SV_Techie
Entrepreneur & Startup Mentor, Technology Investor
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 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 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
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 should see some GitHub-to-GitLab migration and excitement, but Duo Agent is unlikely to contribute meaningfully until next quarter, if not later. A post-earnings drop back to where the stock started, as @cryptopunk2020 predicts, would be welcome as a chance at more cheap shares. 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's AI DevSecOps platform and Duo agents are monetizing faster than Wall Street expects, supporting a $40 price target. 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 restructuring plan earned it an analyst downgrade. 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