Sam Badawi
Stock Analyst, Creator of Origins of Alpha & Quarterly Conviction
GitLab is monetizing AI, the big story behind a strong triple beat that sent shares up 25% premarket. Revenue grew 22% and guidance came in better than feared. Flex ARR grew by triple digits as GitLab shifts toward consumption-based AI revenue, and guidance assumes no material Flex contribution, leaving upside if adoption keeps accelerating. x.com
GitLab should benefit from continued strength in DevOps spending, signalled by JFrog's strong Q2 beat and Barclays raising its JFrog target to $110 from $88. GitLab plays in the same DevSecOps ecosystem and shares similar enterprise software development and AI tailwinds. Its partnership with Google also appears to be growing on the platform. x.com x.com
GitLab's AI DevSecOps platform and Duo agents are monetizing faster than Wall Street expects, supporting a $40 price target. x.com
GitLab is badly undervalued, with the market ignoring over $1B of ARR, $1.26B of cash and almost no debt at a $3.77B market cap and a $21–22 share price. A market-cap-over-DCF model gives a P50 value of $46.83 even before last night's AWS deal, with a path to $74.50 in 3–5 years. The biggest bear point is that nothing in Silicon Valley would be disrupted if GitLab stopped existing tomorrow because of AI. x.com x.com
GitLab faces an existential crisis as the AI "SaaSapocalypse" arrives, yet it still trades at 4.7x sales despite decelerating growth and 10+ analyst downgrades in 2026. x.com
GitLab could pop 20% if its guidance proves sandbagged and it beats and raises. Last quarter's growth was 23%, while guidance for the coming quarter is 15-16%, so a beat looks achievable. Guidance matters most, and it has a good chance of moving up as more code is being produced. x.com x.com
GitLab looks mispriced against the data value implied by xAI's deal for an option to buy Cursor at $60 billion. At about $2.5 billion of enterprise value, GitLab's code data would be worth only around 5% of Cursor's, which is hard to believe; even a weak plan to monetize that data should spark a monster move, and if management won't, another company could acquire GitLab to exploit it. One caveat: a large share of GitLab is self-managed, so that portion cannot be trained on. x.com
GitLab doesn't justify 65x forward earnings or a 17% post-earnings jump. Gross margin is compressing, possibly structurally, the quarter and guide show little operating leverage, it is still EBIT-negative at a $9.2bn market cap, and guidance appears to point to decelerating growth. x.com
OpenAI's open-source Codex Security CLI looks complementary to GitLab rather than a threat, and the market has moved past punishing GitLab on such news. Six months ago, a release that lets users scan repositories, verify fixes and add security checks to CI/CD would have sent the stock down 10%. x.com
GitLab's re-accelerating revenue would make a takeover lucrative, and Anthropic again looks like a credible buyer alongside IBM, OpenAI or Cursor/SpaceX. Growing 23% a year through 2027, then selling to a frontier lab for 8-10x revenue, would be a big return; even IBM as a distressed buyer at 5x would pay off, and IBM may need it to survive. The risk is that labs that don't buy will build their own and the Git duopoly is fading, so conviction is not extreme. x.com
GitLab is not going to become the new GitHub. As @endingwithali notes, GitLab's CEO previously ran New Relic, which was sold to private equity rather than becoming the alternative customers sought when they were annoyed at Datadog's prices. x.com
GitLab is buyable again with the worst of capitulation behind it, as platform usage rises. Its problem was a pricing model leading with full-platform sales at $20-30 a user, limiting upsell, but it is one of the few SaaS companies that can price for usage. DAP offers unpriced optionality for revenue acceleration or margin upside over time, and more in-house software development in sectors like healthcare and financials could support seats. A sale may still be the better outcome. x.com x.com
