The collapse in SaaS has depressed multiples. But in nearly every category, a leader thrives.
CrowdStrike trades at 3.9x the security median ; Cloudflare at 3.4x infrastructure ; & Shopify at 8.1x Commerce median.
Each of them has carved out an AI focused path.
CrowdStrike at 34.4x forward revenue. Palo Alto trades at 22x. Every AI agent an enterprise deploys is a new endpoint to defend, & defending it requires the trillion security events a day CrowdStrike’s Threat Graph already correlates 1.
Cloudflare at 32.6x. The nearest peer, Snowflake, trades at 17.5x. More than half the traffic crossing its network is no longer human 2, so every agent that reaches a customer becomes a request Cloudflare routes, inspects & eventually bills for.
Shopify at 11.3x. Its Commerce peers trade at a 1.4x median. Shopping agents send orders that convert new buyers at twice the rate of other channels, & because they write straight into Shopify, that demand lands at the take rate Shopify already charges 3.
Samsara at 10.8x. Vertical SaaS’s median is 4.0x. The 25 trillion data points a year crossing its platform, dashcam imagery & maintenance workflows that, as Sanjit Biswas put it, aren’t found on the Internet 4, are the training data no foundation model can buy.
ServiceNow at 7.4x. The Productivity & Collaboration median is 3.4x, & Atlassian trades at 5.1x. Enterprises buying agents need somewhere to govern them, which is why ServiceNow’s AI book crossed $1b in annual contract value & is targeted at 30% of total ACV by 2030 5.
Figma at 6.7x. GitLab, the only other Developer & Design name here, trades at 4.6x. As AI commoditizes the code, judgment about what to build becomes the scarce input, & more than 80% of Figma’s customers above $10k in ARR now consume AI credits weekly 6.
Twilio at 5.6x. RingCentral in Communications trades at 2.4x. Voice agents have to reach humans over someone’s network, & that pull accelerated Twilio’s voice revenue past 20% for a sixth consecutive quarter 7.
Salesforce at 4.0x. The Marketing & Sales median is 2.3x. Agents are only as useful as the customer record they act on, which is how Agentforce reached $1.2b ARR & grew 205%, more than half of it sold back into the installed base 8.
None of these are the fastest-growing name in their category. CrowdStrike grows 23% & trades at 34.4x, while Rubrik grows 46% in the same category & trades at 10.4x. Salesforce grows 11%, slower than almost everyone.
But the market believes in the AI story, the harness, the inference revenue, the durability.
Also violating the narrative : nearly every category in public software rallied last quarter, & in Security & Developer & Design every name gained.
Since 2021, the ceiling has fallen from 100x 9 to 34x, & only eleven names now clear 10x. But the top of the market is rosying.
See that little elbow at the very bottom right?
https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/03/03/crowdstrike-crwd-q4-2026-earnings-transcript/↩︎ - https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/08/07/more-than-half-of-cloudflares-network-traffic-is-n/↩︎ - https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/05/05/shopify-shop-q1-2026-earnings-transcript/↩︎ - https://s29.q4cdn.com/853855404/files/doc_financials/2026/q4/CORRECTED-TRANSCRIPT_-Samsara-Inc-IOT-US-Q4-2026-Earnings-Call-5-March-2026-5_00-PM-ET.pdf↩︎ - https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/servicenow-reports-second-quarter-2026-201000482.html↩︎ - https://s206.q4cdn.com/973901332/files/doc_financials/2026/q2/Figma-Q2-26-Prepared-Remarks.pdf↩︎ - https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2026/04/30/twilio-twlo-q1-2026-earnings-transcript/↩︎ - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001108524/000110852426000125/crm-q1fy27xexhibit991.htm↩︎