News of the Week (December 14-18, 2025)

21 min read

My Detailed Earnings reviews from this season:

My current portfolio.

Table of Contents

1. Rubrik (RBRK) – Leadership Interviews with Barclays

Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) Accelerating Bookings from Legacy Displacements:

One of the most encouraging things about Rubrik’s excellent quarterly report was an acceleration in bookings growth from competitive placements. Interestingly, a lot of this momentum has been driven by Veritas and Cohesity (Rubrik competitors) merging. To avoid disruption, Veritas told the customer base that maintenance, platform experience and all other systems would remain the same. The issue is that this merger is between companies with massive product overlap. They need to make the deal work from an ROI perspective by driving cost synergies and eliminating redundant systems. While that usually drives better interoperability and product experiences, that’s not true when you’re trying to stitch a somewhat modern platform into a legacy product solution. The end result has been customer frustration, disruption and no value creation for Veritas and Cohesity customers. This is allowing Rubrik to take their market share at an accelerating clip.

Rubrik sees considerable opportunity for even more market share gains and thinks that the displacement process is still in the very early innings. They expect more success in selling upgraded products and use cases to companies that are already allocating a budget for this type of product to an inferior vendor. When including new identity and agentic markets, they’re around 1% penetrated in terms of total addressable market (TAM).

“We are still just scratching the surface.” – Rubrik Co-Founder/CEO Bipul Sinha

A Review of Rubrik’s Cloud Transformation & Progress:

As a reminder, RBRK pivoted sharply to cloud-based deployments of its resilience platform (data and asset backups to expedite remediation post-breach). This started 3 years ago with a goal of moving 80% of total revenue to the cloud. Rubrik’s intent wasn’t to create upselling opportunities, it was a move to make its platform more malleable and effective for the cloud era. The firm’s product delivery evolution is going better than expected, as nearly 90% of subscription ARR is now cloud-based. Looking ahead, Sinha believes non-cloud subscription ARR will decline for a few more quarters. After that, growth will resume as RBRK still has a solid base of customers and pipeline interested in keeping their Rubrik product usage on-premise.

This transition has also meaningfully propped up revenue growth throughout this fiscal year. Rubrik swapped out complimentary hardware they routinely included in contracts with cloud credits as the company pushed customers to the cloud. These credits replacing comped hardware and the overall business model switch changed revenue recognition patterns. These cloud credits count as “material rights” that are recognized over the course of a contract as revenue. This is different from immediate revenue recognition from the comped hardware. Next year, this material rights factor is expected to flip to a revenue growth headwind, which will mean revenue growth trails ARR growth. All of this makes ARR a much, much better metric to track as a gauge for Rubrik’s growth. That offers the best lens into structural growth.

Identity Resilience:

As discussed in the quarterly review, Rubrik’s Identity Resilience business is off to a great start. Leadership reminded us that the $20M in ARR in three quarters was built without any M&A. It was all organically-built and momentum has been fantastic. They effectively provide insurance for directory (cloud & on-premise) and Identity Provider (IdP) companies through immutable identity backups. These backups, like their immutable data backup product, help companies return to a secure state of operations far quicker by essentially allowing them to “rewind” to the most recent normal web of configurations and access. They provide a backstop when issues arise within Microsoft or Okta environments.

AI Review:

As this is a new company in the coverage network and AI is a new piece of Rubrik’s business, I wanted to review the segment a bit. The company again spent a lot of time covering it in the conference, as it’s a big piece of the future growth story.

“Rubrik Annapurna” (RA): Its data platform retrofitting its existing technology in a way that’s purpose-built for cloud-based AI application data security and delivered through Rubrik APIs. RA preps data for secure AI model usage via vector-based reformatting and without leading to data leakage issues or requiring risky data copies. Its complementary data security posture management (DSPM) module is used to prevent these leakages. This product greatly helps secure data pipelines within Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). RAG is the actual process of feeding large language models (LLMs) needed data to perform tasks.

Purchased Predibase for $100M for “production-ready AI” via granting customers an intuitive, low-code platform to better customize, tune and tweak models with a firm’s 1st-party data and 3P data. That data is what makes AI applications valuable and differentiated. It cuts hallucination rates for models and makes embracing AI a lot easier for enterprises, with Rubrik’s vast database amplifying this benefit. Predibase also provides GPU virtualization services that improve inference efficiency and incrementally support AI adoption. Additionally, the purchase gave Rubrik the tools needed to launch Agent Rewind. As a reminder, like RBRK data and identity rewind products, RBRK provides immutable agent backups, allowing customers to return to normal in minutes rather than weeks.

RAC is its agentic platform that provides customers a full overview of their agents. It tells them what these autonomous assets are doing and whether or not that work is permissible – based on a customer’s own policies. These use cases are offered via Agent Monitoring and Agent Governance applications. From there, it actively optimizes agent work accuracy and can “undo mistakes” via its Agent Rewind module. The interface is as simple as possible to operate and makes enjoying all of this value seamless. By offering companies a full overview of agentic operations, with the help of Predibase, Rubrik is complementing great cyber insurance tools with the infrastructure, flexibility and support required to accelerate AI adoption. Many were confused about why they bought an infrastructure software company like Predibase in the first place, and this is why.

  • The nice part about supporting agentic growth and security is that it naturally supports demand for its core data and cyber resilience business. They get to monetize the acceleration directly and via more consumption of other product pillars.

2026 Budget Environment:

Rubrik sees absolutely no change in the demand environment. Cyber Resilience as a category is the healthiest part of a healthy security spending backdrop.

2. SoFi (SOFI) – CEO Anthony Noto Interview & Stablecoin Launch & Positioning