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Rubrik is a cloud-native data management and security firm. Its core mission is fielding, safeguarding and protecting a firm’s data. Data is everything in the age of AI. It’s how firms build differentiated models and apps, and it’s a primary target for adversaries. Enterprises must be confident that they can embrace this technology without dealing with endless data leakage, breaches and ballooning costs. That’s where Rubrik helps. 

“Rubrik's data platform not only delivers robust cyber protection, but also provides clean, secure data with the necessary permission and policy enforcement to power generative AI applications.” – Co-Founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

Its overarching product suite is called the Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC). Like Zscaler in the world of network security, Rubrik deploys a zero trust approach to data security. This means an adversary can’t simply breach the most vulnerable piece of a firm’s value-rich information and gain free, perpetual access to everything else thereafter. There is constant vetting and verifying of traffic, with policies in place to ensure user friction is only created when required for sound security. Unsurprisingly, these policies are guided by years of scaled operations to master best practices, as well as AI.

Cyber Resilience – Backups:

One of the most important features RBRK offers is something called Immutable Backups. These are redundant, unimpacted data copies that cannot be altered by ransomware and other common attack forms. They’re fully separated from a client’s own operations, adding another layer of resilience.

The explosion of software our world has experienced necessitates this type of product – especially amid the current AI boom. AI agents furiously and ferociously collect data from all over the digital ether to conduct goal-oriented, multi-step tasks. This creates a tangled web of data connections and insatiable processing needs. AI participation requires that companies can prevent their data from being impermissibly accessed and/or jeopardized. BUT… this prevention never comes with a 100% success rate. Breaches happen and will continue to happen. Immutable Backups make that reality palatable, rather than devastating, for enterprises as they lean into AI. With Rubrik, customers enjoy a data insurance policy, as they can more rapidly, seamlessly and successfully return to a normal state of operations.

“What was abundantly clear is that IT and security leaders now have assumed a breach mindset. They are certain that cyber attacks are inevitable despite significant investments they have made in cyber prevention and detection.” – Co-Founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

Cyber Resilience – Hygiene & Prevention:

While Rubrik is an expert at fixing the messes of others, its general “Data Resilience” niche includes several preventative tools as well. 

“We deliver cyber resilience for organizations around the World. From the first line of code to full-stack application.” – Investor Materials

Its Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) provides a 30,000 ft. view of company data, observing misconfigurations and poor hygiene before those vulnerabilities lead to costly breaches. It makes security data discovery, categorization and risk management a lot more intuitive. Data Access Governance (DAG) is a close DSPM complement, as DAG provides a full picture of who is using sensitive data, while DSPM uncovers how they’re using it. That's how Rubrik customers have an easier and faster time with determining who has access beyond a minimum permission framework.

There's also a category of preventative tools it calls “Data Threat Analytics.” A core piece of this is next-gen anomaly detection that more rapidly uncovers abnormal usage patterns; it also guides where to investigate and counter potential attacks to up-level threat monitoring. Adversaries are constantly trying to break into RBRK data backups. While doing so is highly difficult, it's not impossible if an attacker can impermissibly obtain credentials. That happens all the time and anomaly detection quickly shows where this is occurring.

Finally, it has an active threat hunting product called “Turbo Threat Hunting.” As the name fittingly indicates, Turbo Threat Hunting enables rapid cyber recovery by scanning up to 75,000 data backups in under a minute. It achieves this speed by using randomized data file codes (industry lingo is pre-computed hash values). This method more instantly checks for any malware or other issues (industry lingo is known Indicators of Compromise). Metadata (context that describes and categorizes batches of data) is created, eliminating a need to tediously scan files one at a time.

Cyber Resilience – Recovery & Identity Recovery:

Its data recovery tools are real-time and lean heavily on aforementioned immutable backups to ensure it always has unaffected data copies to deploy. Its recovery products are grouped under the “Preemptive Recovery Engine” umbrella. This umbrella augments backups by constantly scanning them for any potential issues so that companies are 100% certain these backups are ready to go whenever needed. That's a lot of potential anxiety removed for its clients. From there, RBRK eliminates the risk of system reinfection by conducting remediation within data clean rooms and ensuring changes are implemented in risk-free, not runtime, environments. And importantly, Rubrik also provides a rapid 5-step program that greatly shrinks identity remediation time. Time is money.

Sticking with identity for a moment, the security company launched the Rubrik Identity Recovery Solution just a few quarters ago. The launch extended its data protection to popular identity sources like Microsoft’s Active Directory (on-prem) and Entra ID (cloud-based). This RBRK product is already up to 200 customers and is winning large deals.

For Rubrik, identity is inherently tied to its overall data security business, which leadership believes is an edge. Combining the context from its DSPM product and other data security tools with its identity offering is, per Rubrik, entirely unique in the market and is creating rapid traction. The categoric conjoining utilizes data security cues to help customers more holistically understand potential vulnerabilities upon identity access granting. That enhances RBRK’s ability to track identity misconfigurations and impermissible alterations. It shows companies where sensitive data access could be happening and where to focus in case of a breach.

“We uniquely combined data security posture management, identity resilience and cyber recovery natively on our Rubrik Security Cloud, or RSC platform to achieve complete cyber resilience.” – Co-Founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

“Attackers don’t break in. They log in… We have a belief that cyber resilience requires both data resilience and identity resilience. ” – Co-Founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

Separately, RBRK groups Threat Containment products into this overall recovery category. The module helps by making sure the recovery process is confined to a comparatively smaller piece of a company’s data infrastructure. Thanks to RBRK’s zero trust foundation, this product ensures that compromised portions of a firm’s data estate don’t lead to an adversary breaching the remainder of that estate.

Cloud Cyber Resilience – Hyperscaler Relationships as it Prioritizes Cloud-Based Data Protection:

As it keeps fixating on cloud-based data protection growth, it recently added integrations and coverage with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Google Cloud to extend its interoperable, cloud-agnostic value proposition. The cloud-based portion of data security will likely be its most promising and durable growth vector. Focusing and executing here is imperative.

The relationship with Microsoft is the closest of any of the hyperscalers, considering MSFT actually owns a minority stake in the company. The two have co-developed some important products and seem to be collaborating quite nicely together. That’s refreshing after following CrowdStrike and SentinelOne for a few years and seeing the competitive threat Microsoft can represent. The mega-cap doesn’t have the best tech… but they do have the best bundle. Fortunately, that bundle (at least for now) will include Rubrik, rather than supplanting it. Amazon and Alphabet do try to compete a little more with Rubrik, but the relationships are still quite friendly in those cases too:

Importantly, RBRK manages the movement of data to and from various public clouds. In 2025, virtually all enterprises want multi-cloud access for flexibility and redundancy; with Rubrik, they can use any provider and still be assured that data transferral and processing is efficient, interoperable and safe.

Cloud Cyber Resilience – Data Efficiency:

Its multi-cloud offering includes metadata that tags and groups low-priority information. With that capability, Rubrik routinely cuts customer costs by archiving what is no longer needed, thus minimizing storage while maintaining compliance. The fully managed archive product is called the Rubrik Cloud Vault (RCV).

Its Smart Tiering system (part of RCV) amplifies customer and partner savings in a couple of ways. First, it intelligently routes backups throughout its broad list of partners, automatically parking data at the best option at any given time. It constantly evaluates stored data to more quickly understand when and how the cheaper aforementioned archive tier can be leveraged. If archiving is the correct decision, Rubrik will “de-duplicate” and compress that chunk of data before it’s moved, further minimizing data egress and storage fees. This can result in massive (90%+) cuts to daily server backups, where most of that data consists of entirely redundant and identical files.

Enterprise AI Acceleration:

“Rubrik Annapurna” (RA) retrofits its data platform in ways that are purpose-built for AI application data security. RA preps data for secure AI model usage via vector-based reformatting and without leading to data leakage issues. This product greatly helps secure data pipelines within Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG is the actual process of feeding large language models (LLMs) needed data to perform tasks. 

Rubrik deepened its AI commitment with the recent purchase of Predibase for a little over $100M (cash and equity mix). This acquisition makes it a better AI adoption partner. Predibase fosters “production ready-AI” via granting customers an intuitive, low-code platform to customize, tune and tweak models so they can better handle a firm’s 1st-party data. That data is what makes AI applications valuable and differentiated. Predibase + Rubrik will make value creation in this realm a lot easier. The combination will “deliver radical simplicity” for AI assets, which will mean lower hallucination rates, more granular use cases and better performance. To make sure these efficiency gains are as dramatic as they can be, Predibase also features training and inference optimization support.

With the acquisition closed, Rubrik has already used the new assets to launch Agent Rewind. Like its original data backups allow companies to reverse breaches and return to a steady state of operations, this does that for Agents. It allows these machine-based assets to seamlessly “undo their own mistakes” by monitoring traffic and flagging issues as soon as they surface. This happens without full system rollbacks.

RBRK views Predibase as a key total addressable market (TAM) expander for their business. They envision it accelerating  AI enterprise adoption and deepening the value harvesting that will coincide. I see why they’re excited. Being a best-in-class enterprise backstop for data breaches and agentic errors while also making a client's usage of this new technology more successful is a compelling combination. It will give Rubrik a great chance of evolving with their customers as they tap into Agentic AI.

If they execute, RBRK should benefit from direct product sales, while faster enterprise AI adoption would mean more overall data demand and another indirect tailwind. Good purchase.

“We believe the combination of Rubrik and Predibase is incredibly powerful in accelerating GenAI from proof of concept to full production and value realization.” – Co-Founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

Latest release (section added end of October 2025)

Rubrik launched their Agent Cloud offering this week. It’s built on Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) and (I think) has a great chance to resonate with clients. The purpose of the debut is clear. Agents are exploding in size and creating a massive new autonomous machine asset class. These machines race around the digital ether to collect information for task completion and openly reason on how best to complete those tasks. That’s very exciting. It can vastly accelerate productivity while cutting costs and eliminating tedious work from day-to-day schedules. But? It also creates a large new security risk. These autonomous assets aren’t perfect. They make mistakes and reason incorrectly just like people do. And furthermore, adversaries are openly targeting them, knowing a successful hack can lead to a much larger, more persuasive and more damaging breach. These agents move very quickly and touch many parts of the online world. That’s immensely valuable for productivity, but also means corporations must concede a bigger security risk.

Agent Cloud is meant to eliminate that security concession. It’s a way for companies to confidently embrace this disruptive asset class, while enjoying its profound positives and minimizing the negatives.

Specifically, Agent Cloud includes three products. First, Agent Monitor flags and organizes infrastructure-based and platform-based agents across public cloud environments. This observability product provides a bird’s-eye view of all agentic assets in circulation, fostering a more complete idea of agentic operations. Knowledge is power… but knowledge with actionable work stemming from it is even more powerful. That’s where the other two products help.

Secondly, Agent Govern is what actually tracks agent performance. It uncovers which parts of prompts are potentially leading to suboptimal work, with real-time tools to tweak those prompts and broader policies. This is the agentic performance optimizer, which tightly integrates with popular identity directories. That’s so important, as it means companies can implement the same human-based access guardrails they have for machine-based assets. They can use that experience rather than having to learn brand new ways to set ID policies. All of this again minimizes the tradeoff between agentic adoption and security headache.

The third product in this release is perhaps the most exciting. It’s called Agent Remediate. Many companies have great observability and configuration tools for cloud and agent-based assets. It’s far more rare for them to have modules that can actively undo agent-based blunders. Rubrik leverages the “Agent Rewind” capability that it debuted in August (thanks to its Predibase purchase) to make this possible. With it, RBRK can rapidly determine which pieces of a company are vulnerable to an agentic error (called a “blast radius”). It can then use its immutable data backups to revert to the most recent, pre-error environment. I love seeing them applying their bread-and-butter product to new categories. Agent Remediate expedites time to normalization and diminishes the amount of a digital estate that’s affected. Both of these things lower customer costs – especially considering this happens without any “downtime or data loss.” Rubrik can proactively find and fix agentic errors before they become a catastrophe. 

Going back to Predibase for a moment. The entire point of that purchase was to help Rubrik accelerate enterprise AI adoption. They call this acceleration process “AI enablement.” indirectly benefits from this enablement via the large boost in overall company assets that need protecting. Their product suite was already well-positioned for that before this launch. With this release and Predibase’s low-code agent and model customization tools, it is quickly rounding out exciting capabilities to directly harvest financial value from AI enablement.

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Rubrik has adopted a cloud-based subscription model. It has proactively pushed customers from its licensing and maintenance revenue model to annualized subscriptions. As a result, subscription revenue as a % of total was 94% last year vs. 64% 2 years ago. That’s expected to rise to 96% this year and is a change that I find quite positive. This form of revenue recognition is more visible, less lumpy and entails easier cross-selling to other products. It no longer relies on hardware sales or refresh cycles, which others, such as Palo Alto, are rapidly trying to get away from.

Rubrik retrofitted and evolved their hardware-based business into a pure software as a service model and did so quite effectively. This conversion process, which includes Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) credits to expedite the transition, is currently boosting subscription ARR growth by 1 point. That benefit will be “minimal” this year and gone by FY 2027. Furthermore, the transition is leading to accelerated revenue recognition as it’s able to record allocated licensing reserves as revenue faster than it would have been able to. This meant 44% Y/Y revenue growth was actually 51% Y/Y last quarter, representing a 7-point boost. The full-year impact will be an added 6 points to revenue growth for FY 2026, with that being “minimal” next fiscal year. This makes it even more important to focus on ARR growth instead of artificially high revenue growth until things normalize.

For now, based on the maintenance revenue transition discussed above, it is best to focus on ARR growth. Revenue growth will continue to be artificially propped up much more meaningfully this year. Subscription-related revenue outperformance did encouragingly contribute to the large beat, but non-recurring maintenance revenue also was a big help.

Gross margin expanded in part due to non-recurring revenue outperformance. At the same time, other items like lower hosting costs and hosting cost credits also helped GPM during the quarter. That’s why they expect full-year GPM to be around 77.5% vs. the 81.6% it posted this quarter.

FCF was driven by structural operating leverage and subscription ARR outperformance. It was also helped by the same non-recurring revenue outperformance, as well as some changes to its capital structure. It raised $1B in convertible notes to pay off more expensive debt, which led to more net cash on the balance sheet and lower interest expenses. Both helped FCF margin. Finally, some renewal timing helped FCF during the quarter.

For the full year, RBRK raised subscription ARR guidance by 2% or $28M. This was $3M larger than the Q2 beat, meaning rest-of-year expectations improved. It also raised annual revenue guidance by 4% or $48M. This beat estimate by 3.5% was $18M larger than the Q2 beat. Because of the non-recurring revenue and maintenance transitioning to a subscription model, revenue is a somewhat noisy metric and subscription ARR is what to focus on. This is especially true because a chunk of the revenue raise was due to raising expected non-recurring revenue contribution from this change. Customers being moved to subscription contracts received credits related to this evolution in exchange for them conceding future rights to appliance-based service obligations. Sometimes those credits expire instead of being rolled into new products, which prompts revenue recognition for RBRK. This dynamic was more favorable than expected and is expected, as more customers let credits expire vs. using them. That is not a positive, yet led to some of the revenue beat. Again… This is why it’s so important to focus on ARR. If that didn’t look as good as it does, this item would be a lot more concerning. Churn within their legacy business is being comfortably offset by their thriving newer business. Next, it raised non-GAAP EPS guidance from -$0.99 to -$0.47, which beat by $0.51. Finally, it raised FCF guidance from $70M to $150M.

Other guidance notes:

Rubrik won a “major North American oil and gas company” in a legacy competitor displacement. That competitor’s data backup product failed to promptly help the customer normalize operations following a major breach, leading to the RBRK win. Rubrik’s recovery time is better for the new customer than this competitor and all other products tested. The win includes its cloud workloads. Rubrik’s backup offering also won a Fortune 50 pharma company for “its critical applications” in another brownfield win that replaced a 20-year-old contract. According to leadership, Rubrik’s superior backup offering and lower relative cloud costs led to the victory.

Within the attractive cloud-based portion of this segment, Rubrik expanded a Fortune 500 transportation company contract with cloud coverage of their Microsoft 365, Azure, GitHub source code, and more workloads. The more wins Rubrik has within hyperscaler estates, especially with its 80+ NPS, the harder it will be for these hyperscalers to displace them. That helps ensure that the close, friendly relationships it currently has with the hyperscalers remain that way for the long haul. The customer also added identity recovery, which cut simulated recovery time of a breached “Active Directory and Entra ID from weeks to hours.” According to the team, every single day of customer downtime costs $65M, resulting in dramatic cost savings with Rubrik as their backup vendor vs. the competition.

There is a lot of friendly cooperation… but some competitive overlap between Rubrik and other popular cybersecurity players. For endpoint, CrowdStrike and SentinelOne offer products similar to Rubrik’s DSPM while boasting modules that help with overall data loss prevention (DLP). At the same time, these products all take slightly different angles towards protection. For example, CrowdStrike attempts to protect data-in-motion or how data is being used in live endpoint environments. They make sure usage is permissible and safe, while blocking it when it isn’t. Rubrik, on the other hand, is safeguarding data-at-rest, with ample recovery capabilities for wherever preventative security from endpoint, network and identity providers fails. That’s when Rubrik steps in to save the day.

Furthermore, Rubrik is close partners with CrowdStrike, making the relationship skew even more towards friends rather than enemies. The two leaders have a tight integration in which they’re actively combining technological strengths to improve shared client outcomes. CrowdStrike shares threat detection signals with Rubrik to help accelerate deliverance of immutable and contextualized data copies with flagged sensitive data. And furthermore, RBRK shares its findings with CRWD to help it more effectively stop breaches. Most recently, CrowdStrike added a Rubrik Identity Resilience integration for its identity security offering as well.

In network, the relationship with Zscaler is even more friendly compared to endpoint-centric players. Zscaler’s DSPM and DLP products directly pull from Rubrik’s technology as part of a native integration between the two platforms. RBRK identifies sensitive data-at-rest and misconfigurations, making Zscaler's data-in-motion network protection better. The joint zero trust foundations inherently shrink shared customer attack surfaces – making maintenance and recovery much easier. In turn, Zscaler shares network data to enrich RBRK's own products. Just like with CrowdStrike, these two players work very well together.

RBRK has also developed a tight Palo Alto Integration. Rubrik’s suite is readily available within Palo Alto’s Extended Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (XSOAR) product. With Rubrik, Palo Alto’s automated workflows created to address and fix issues are more accurately guided by the infusion of its data and tech.

Finally, in Identity, Rubrik directly integrates with platforms like Okta. Rubrik’s identity-based recovery tools were recently made available on Okta via the new “Rubrik Okta Recovery" tool. This adds to the native integration Rubrik already has with Okta’s Identity Threat Protection. It builds on aforementioned Active Directory and Entra ID integrations to make RBRK much more omnipresent in this space. There's no close relationship with CyberArk, but Palo Alto buying that company could feasibly change things.

It’s very heartening to see leaders in various parts of cybersecurity actively plugging into this firm’s product suite. All companies mentioned have somewhat related data tagging and categorizing offerings, yet they feel the need to lean on RBRK’s products rather than building their own. To me, this shows that Rubrik is creating high-quality modules that can’t be easily replicated by other firms. And believe me, they would be replaced if possible. All of these companies are encroaching on each other's territory as they search for more total addressable market (TAM) to extend growth runways. That process will continue and makes RBRK's great value proposition all the more important.

“There is no change in the competitive environment for us. We still win the vast, vast, vast majority of deals against all competition, legacy as well as new-gen vendors.” – Co-founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

The most notable competitors for Rubrik are Veeam, Commvault and Cohesity. Commvault is the only public company out of the 3. It’s the more mature player, while Rubrik is a disruptive darling in their space. The backup products overlap in virtually every single regard and Commvault is certainly a capable alternative. Still, after speaking with a few former and current users of these products (some of you from the Discord room so thank you for your input), Cohesity and Veeam are the competitors to focus on.

Cohesity is generally thought to be superior to Rubrik on data storage costs (de-duplication). They compete quite well on pricing, which helps them win some customers. Rubrik’s simple user interface is considered a strength while its zero trust security portfolio and platform are generally considered more advanced than Cohesity’s – especially on the identity side. Cohesity is trying to catch up, but there’s thought to be a material lead for Rubrik. Again, Cohesity is not public, so information is quite limited. These were merely the convincing opinion patterns and themes that formed from piecing together research on that firm.

Veeam's data platform is scaled and boasts a free offering for businesses with simple needs. That is appealing to smaller companies where conceding "good enough" performance in exchange for lower costs is sometimes the right decision. But while many will argue that Veeam is more cost effective than Rubrik for most small business cases… I’d argue there’s a large caveat. Rubrik requires a dedicated appliance installation vs. Veeam’s software-only system. Veeam makes customers pick whatever 3rd party appliance they want to run alongside the software, which means a separate vendor bill and more integration maintenance costs. That diminishes the up-front price gap between the two, while providing Rubrik with vendor consolidation, billing simplicity and interoperability edges. Large enterprises love those strengths, which is why 85% of RBRK's ARR is from customers over $100K in annual business. For comparison, Commvault's average ARR per customer is around $10K.

Next, Rubrik is well ahead of Veeam in terms of security product breadth and utility. Veeam is trying to catch up via non-native partner integrations. That might allow them to market more product capabilities, but those capabilities will come with even more vendor siloes and fragmented operations vs. Rubrik. That doesn’t work for large enterprises, which is again why Rubrik dominates in that category.

It’s apparent that the most commonly perceived negative of using Rubrik’s suite vs. others is higher upfront backup costs. They charge more for that product and that’s a good thing in my mind. I find it very telling that Rubrik has done so well with large customers despite this cost disadvantage. That’s because Rubrik is more of a platform with a wider array of relevant, valuable security add-ons. It’s because its platform resilience is commonly better than the others. That makes its price-to-value ratio better despite the numerator being higher. Pricing power only comes from incremental value. If Rubrik wasn’t providing this incremental value, there would be no reason to pay them more than another vendor.

I cannot stress this enough. The appeal of this investment case hinges on the power of Rubrik’s cross-selling engine. I think the gap between Rubrik’s core data backup product vs. the others is there, but it’s modest. That gap moves from modest to sizable as it sells more of the other products that backup alternatives can’t match. As that gap grows, companies care less about saving a bit of money with one backup tool vs. Rubrik’s.

Please note that EBIT multiple estimates are higher than they would be for a company further into their profit journey. This is because in 2028, the base case expectation is for EBIT margin to more than double from 5% to 11%. That will mean EBIT growth greatly, greatly leads revenue growth. That is why the traditional EBIT multiples are lofty. For context, a 100x EBIT multiple, based on current estimates, would coincide with a growth multiple well around 0.5x.

Also note that I don’t find complex modeling useful. I am in the Buffett camp… change one assumption and the entire outcome changes sharply. I prefer offering ranges of potential outcomes and spending more time on company research than staring at a (almost surely inaccurate) spreadsheet. I'd like to remind everyone how uncertain modeling multiple years into the future always is.

In terms of non-competition-related risks and how we end up in the worst scenarios, it’s all about the growth engine. This business model should deliver rapid operating leverage for a few years. I don’t find that to be a risky opinion. Just like other platforms, they have so much margin-accretive cross-selling left to do, so much cost optimization left to enjoy, and so much AI-powered automation left to deliver. The inevitable EBIT inflection is coming and I see zero reason why this can’t eventually have a 20%+ margin there. It will take a while, but the path is crystal clear. I don’t see much risk to the margin profile unless growth falls off of a cliff and they’re forced to aggressively invest well beyond current expectations. Again… It's all about top-line growth. 

Other partners already mentioned could begin to try to displace Rubrik rather than joining hands with them and others like Alphabet are more able to foster bundle-driven discounts than Rubrik can. 

Macro cycles could easily elongate sales cycles, but I think those headwinds will be ephemeral and manageable for a mission-critical product suite such as this one. Outages like we saw with CrowdStrike in 2024 are always possible and I do not think RBRK has the level of multi-product adoption to enjoy the stickiness and demand resilience that Falcon did through that turmoil. I do think RBRK is sticky, but not that sticky. Few companies are.

This is an interesting company. I was not expecting to be a shareholder here, as I already have a lot of cybersecurity and enterprise software exposure. At the same time, I can see how mission-critical the niche they’ve carved out is. The team seems highly capable, the growth is very strong, and they have a history of sharply beating expectations. That makes me confident there should be upside to current 25% 2-year forward revenue CAGR expectations. The runway is quite long and AI is a clear tailwind, not a competitive displacement risk like it is for other software firms. All of their new offerings are gaining traction and the Predibase acquisition can extend RBRK’s value proposition beyond security into the world of AI enablement. The margin path is very encouraging and it’s all but inevitable that expansion will continue to be brisk. Not linear, but brisk.

The valuation is not all that cheap, but still not terribly expensive either – especially if the margin trajectory continues on like it should. This team is fixated on profitable growth and delivering returns for shareholders… they won’t spend irresponsibly. I do think effectively cross-selling will be key to establishing durable and defensible differentiation beyond data backups, but I don’t think assuming that will happen is a reach at this point. I think it’s easily the most likely outcome.

I always move very slowly with investment decisions. I like to think, think and think some more after doing detailed research like I did here. If you find that annoying, I understand. I am considering making this a member of the portfolio and taking advantage of the Shopify trim and cash infusion that both lowered my enterprise software exposure. I’ve made no decisions, but at the very least, this is a new watchlist item.