Every quarter we look at the revenue multiples of publicly traded SaaS companies. One analysis we’ve started doing is to look at the 10 companies with the highest multiples and try to understand what is actually driving their valuations. Below are the top 10 for Q2 2026.
Looking at this list, it’d be easy to say “these companies are AI forward, so they’re getting the best multiples,” but in our view that’s too lazy. The median multiple is 17.86x revenue and the average is 24.44x, with Palantir at a stratospheric 56.46x at one end and Samsara at a still-premium 11.29x at the other. It’s not just AI; below are our observations:
Infrastructure plays with exceptional growth at scale. The most consistent characteristic across this cohort is that none of these companies are discretionary tools, rather they are infrastructure. And they are growing fast even at significant scale. Palantir grew revenue 85% year-over-year in Q1 2026 to a $5.2 billion LTM base, with a Rule of 40 score of 145. CrowdStrike crossed $5.25 billion in ARR growing 24%. Cloudflare grew 34% to a $2.3 billion LTM revenue base. Datadog delivered its first $1 billion revenue quarter growing 32% year-over-year. Snowflake sustained 27–29% growth at nearly $5 billion in LTM revenue. Samsara is approaching $2 billion in ARR growing 31% while achieving GAAP profitability for the third consecutive quarter. These are not small companies growing quickly, and that deserves a premium.
Cash generation. Palantir generated $2.1 billion in LTM cash flow on $5.2 billion in revenue, a 40% cash flow margin. CrowdStrike generated $1.6 billion in LTM cash flow. Cloudflare and Datadog are generating meaningful free cash flow. Rubrik and Shopify are both at or near positive EBITDA at meaningful scale. Samsara is at breakeven EBITDA on $1.7 billion in revenue while growing 31%. The cohort average cash flow margin is approximately 25% which signals these durable unit economics rather than growth funded by burning capital.
Many of these multiples have historical precedent. It is worth noting that several of these companies (Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Snowflake, Datadog, and Shopify) have commanded premium multiples for years, well before generative AI became a mainstream narrative. In some cases their current multiples are lower than their pandemic-era peaks even as the underlying businesses are dramatically larger and more profitable. The market’s willingness to pay a premium for these specific names reflects a long-standing consensus about their competitive positions, not a recent AI-driven re-rating.
AI is a valuation amplifier, not the sole explanation. The market is rewarding platforms where AI directly and measurably increases usage, customer expansion, and structural relevance. Palantir’s ontology-grounded agentic platform, its boot camp model converting enterprise customers at an accelerating pace, and its proximity to the most sensitive government AI deployments in the world give it a credibility as applied AI infrastructure. CrowdStrike is the security operating system for AI infrastructure; its sensors detected 160 million unique AI application instances in a single quarter and its AIDR product grew 5x in its first weeks. Cloudflare is processing hundreds of billions of agentic requests per month and executed a 20% workforce reduction on the same day it reported 34% revenue growth, signaling genuine AI-driven productivity rather than managed decline. Datadog delivered its first $1 billion revenue quarter with AI customers representing 80% of ARR despite being only 20% of accounts. Snowflake’s Cortex Intelligence is nearly doubling quarter-over-quarter in account adoption. Rubrik’s pipeline grew 50% in a single quarter after Anthropic’s Mythos demonstrated what autonomous AI attacks can do to enterprise infrastructure. Samsara’s AI Safety Coach and Operational AI platform are competing for the physical labor productivity market, a TAM that no software company has previously been able to address. JFrog benefits from a compounding demand dynamic: every AI coding tool that increases developer velocity also increases the volume of open-source dependencies pulled into production, expanding the attack surface that JFrog’s artifact governance platform addresses. Its cloud revenue grew 50% year-over-year and it crossed 50% cloud revenue share for the first time. None of these AI tailwinds are theoretical. They are showing up in net new ARR, in NRR, in pipeline growth, and in guided revenue acceleration.
Size does not disqualify a premium. DigitalOcean at $15.1 billion market cap and $900 million in LTM revenue looks small next to Palantir and CrowdStrike, yet commands 17.67x revenue. The explanation is positioning and trajectory. DigitalOcean’s AI customer ARR grew 221% to $170 million in Q1 2026, its 2027 revenue growth guidance was raised to 50%+, and it is explicitly repositioning as “the inference and agentic cloud,” purpose-built for AI-native companies whose data gravity and switching costs are increasing with every workload they deploy. Similarly Rubrik at 11.64x revenue despite negative EBITDA and negative cash flow reflects the market pricing a company that is growing subscription revenue 41% year-over-year with NRR above 120% and a structural demand tailwind from every enterprise that needs to survive a ransomware attack in the AI era.
Shopify earns its multiple from a different angle. At 12.28x revenue on a $12.4 billion LTM base with 34% YoY growth, Shopify is the only pure commerce infrastructure play in this cohort. Its premium reflects the same infrastructure-plus-growth logic as the others, but with a different AI angle: Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol and its embedded position in every merchant’s revenue stack means that as AI agents begin executing commercial transactions autonomously, they will flow through Shopify’s infrastructure regardless of which model or agent platform initiates them. The commerce layer is as foundational to the agentic economy as the security layer or the data layer.
The common thread. Today’s highest software multiples are reserved for businesses that pair exceptional growth at scale, strong cash generation, infrastructure-like switching costs, and a credible AI demand tailwind with real financial evidence behind it. The cohort average of 36% YoY revenue growth at a median revenue base of $3 billion, while generating median cash flow of $850 million, is the financial profile the market is paying 17–56x revenue for. You cannot get there by being an interesting AI story. You get there by being essential infrastructure that AI makes more essential every quarter.
Thank you for your readership. See more blogs and SaaS data at blossomstreetventures.com. Other resources we’ve built for founders include: SoftwareMultiples.com; softwareMRRcalculator.com; FounderInvited.com, and TwoFoundersTalk.com. Founders are always welcome to reach out to sammy@blossomstreetventures.com as well.