RBC Software Snapshots: European Marketing Highlights: Investor Sentiment/Interest Slowly Recovering

Research evidence excerpt

RBC Software Snapshots: European Marketing Highlights: Investor Sentiment/Interest Slowly Recovering

RBC Software Snapshots: European Marketing Highlights: Investor

Sentiment/Interest Slowly Recovering

• MDB: why has this stock lagged the consumption trade? MDB stock is down 22% YTD, in

contrast to consumption “peers” DDOG (+63%) and SNOW (+6%). In our view, this is a function

partly of MDB’s consumption model being materially different and AI tailwinds taking longer

to ramp. Having said that, we believe MDB is making the correct investments under new

CEO CJ Desai (including reinvesting in EA and refocusing on developers and the San Francisco

Bay Area) and believe AI customers will start to scale with MDB in the next several quarters,

including Cursor (announced Sep 2025), Anthropic (announced Jan 2026), and ElevenLabs,

among others.

• ORCL: where is investor sentiment? To some extent, ORCL has become a bit of a trading

vehicle, especially as it pertains to CDS and AI infrastructure build-out and, to a lesser extent,

as a proxy for OpenAI (more due to backlog concentration versus any strategic ownership). We

remain on the sidelines on ORCL around uncertainty on financing, rising CapEx, and questions

on unit economics and margins for the OpenAI deal.

• INTU: is tax already facing AI headwinds? We believe the short answer to this is yes, but

with some caveats. With a somewhat softer April tax quarter (see here), INTU has been under

meaningful pressure. We believe some of this is due to AI (mostly DIY), but predominantly

with simpler tax filers, which we estimate represents ~15% of total paid TurboTax users. On

the other hand, we see real AI benefits for INTU over time, especially leveraging data, context,

and distribution, while also potentially offering indemnification.