Palantir, the largest position in both our AI and Cybersecurity portfolios, impressed again last night with revenue growth accelerating for the sixth quarter in a row to 36% (from 30%) and a FY25 revenue growth guidance of 31%, both figures coming 5-10% ahead of expectations. The strong top-line performance sparked another significant margin leverage, with…
Synapse Invest was founded in 2019 with the mission of offering a diverse range of thematic investment products centered around innovation. Our journey began with the launch of our first Actively Managed Certificates (AMCs) in the closing weeks of 2019, and we are now proud to celebrate more than five years of consistent growth and…
While most software companies, from the small ones (C3.ai, MongoDB…) to the large ones (Adobe, ServiceNow, Salesforce…), are now wannabe AI companies, Palantir is the real deal in our view. The company, known for its software products used by governments/military around the world, has developed over the years an AI platform (AIP) that is quickly…
The upcoming earnings season could be a bit noisy for the cybersecurity players, as violence escalation in the Middle East is likely to have hampered project timelines and delays product innovations in Israel where many cybersecurity firms are located and/or have large R&D teams. It’s probably no coincidence that Q3 VC funding in cybersecurity startups…
Even if cybersecurity remains a top IT priority for most organizations (along with AI, obviously) and, accordingly, keeps growing fast, two events affecting two of the largest cybersecurity vendors have weighed down on investor sentiment this year: Palo Alto’s aggressive pricing policy, fueling concerns about the company’s short-term outlook and potential industry-wide discounting initiatives; and,…
The cybersecurity sector had a rough ride last week as Palo Alto Networks (a portfolio company), one of the industry leaders, announced an underwhelming billings guidance for both the current quarter (only +2-4%, after +16% in CQ4) and the full year (+10-11% vs +16-17% previously). Amid healthy cybersecurity spending, Palo Alto’s figures clearly came as…
UK-based Darktrace kicked off the cybersecurity earnings season with a robust set of figures and a guidance upgrade, giving confidence that the recent rally in security stocks is sustainable as fundamentals improve. In H1 (calendar H2), Darktrace delivered 27% revenue growth, 3% above expectations, with an EBITDA margin above 19% (100-200bps above consensus) and raised…
Eighteen months after initial reports of M&A talks, networking giant Cisco announced the takeover of data analytics and cybersecurity software company Splunk in a massive $28 billion deal (both Cisco and Splunk are portfolio companies). The 32% premium is in line with recent sector transactions and the valuation multiple (6x revenue) is in the low-end…
As we commented a couple of months ago, generative AI has been emerging as a weapon for hackers, making phishing attempts (emails or texts inviting a user to open a malicious link to steal his/her credentials) bespoke and then much harder to detect, and helping to reduce malware software development cycles and/or rewrite code to…
The cybersecurity sector has come under pressure over the last couple of days following Microsoft’s introduction of a secure web gateway solution (SWG) called Entra, that complements the Tech giant’s leading franchise in identity/access management and extended detection and response (XDR). SWG – which is one of the main components of Gartner’s defined Secure Access…