Software Sundays: Asia Marketing, Palantir Investor Meeting, SNOW, MDB, ESTC Previews

Research evidence excerpt

Software Sundays: Asia Marketing, Palantir Investor Meeting, SNOW, MDB, ESTC Previews

May 24, 2026

Zoom reported F1Q27 results (HERE) last week delivering a clean beat

across revenue, margins, and FCF while raising full-year guidance. Strength

in the quarter was driven by continued CX/Phone momentum and broader

AI adoption across the platform, reinforcing our view that Zoom's AI

monetization is broadening from a single freemium lever into a multi-layer

revenue engine spanning collaboration, voice, CX, and vertical workflows.

We note strategic investments totaled $1.88b at the end of F1Q, with the

majority of this being related to holding (from 2023) in Anthropic (private),

and based on February funding round at $380b valuation. If reported

valuation levels are reached (i.e., $900b) and we hold our PT multiples and

all other forecasts constant, we believe shares could reach $116 (assuming

$1.5b of the $1.88b is Anthropic and zero dilution in future investment

rounds, and 2.4x higher valuation to ~ $900b).

Over the past two weeks, we also traveled across Asia meeting with

more than 35 of Cantor’s top institutional investors in the region. The

overarching takeaway from these discussions is that sentiment toward

software remains notably cautious. Investor conversations were heavily

centered on AI and the potential for leading frontier models to disrupt the

broader software landscape, with a prevailing view that intelligence layers

will increasingly expand both up and down the stack, disrupting spending

across the software ecosystem.

Investor focus was concentrated around developments around OpenAI,

Anthropic, and opensource / China-based LLMs as well as how spending

and usage at these layers of the evolving AI stack are impacting overall

IT spend across enterprises.