Summary Cloudflare stands out as a Rule of 40 cybersecurity leader, accelerating revenue growth above 30% despite a $3B run rate. NET’s broad platform, $196B+ TAM, and robust enterprise customer growth (55% y/y for $1M+ accounts) support continued expansion. The company is reported to partner with Coinbase in introducing a stablecoin, NET Dollar, to enable AI agents to make payments across the web. Q4 revenue beat by 5 points, with net retention rising to 120%, demonstrating strong customer stickiness and expansion. I upgrade NET to buy, citing resilient execution, premium justified by quality, and a favorable position against AI disruption. Investors have been dumping software stocks all year, but one subsector that has experienced tremendous pain is cybersecurity. Ever since Claude unveiled new security capabilities, investors have dumped cybersecurity stocks on fears that vibe-coded AI agents will soon be able to overtake incumbent security protocols. Against this backdrop, Cloudflare ( NET ), one of the leading cloud services and cloud security companies, has been a relative outperformer, with its stock rallying in February after a strong Q4 earnings print and down only ~10% from October highs above $250. The company has been driving outsized growth at its Rule of 40 financial profile, with its base of large customers also growing meaningfully. Data by YCharts I last wrote a neutral article on Cloudflare in November, when the stock was trading closer to $210 per share. Since then, Cloudflare has delivered revenue acceleration in Q4 while pointing to a very robust year for growth in FY26. At the same time, its valuation multiples still look reasonable (though not as cheap as many other peers in the software, and particularly cybersecurity sectors). I continue to think that investors will look to Rule of 40 companies like Cloudflare that are in a relatively safer position from AI disruption as a bastion of safety in the tech sector, and with all of these factors in mind, I'm upgrading the stock to a buy. To me, these are the main tailwinds that investors should be watching closely in Cloudflare: Cloudflare is achieving meaningful acceleration even at its already-sizable scale. Many companies have been citing AI as a tailwind, but most software companies are facing deceleration in revenue growth. Cloudflare is showcasing the opposite. Despite its nearly $3 billion annualized revenue run rate, Cloudflare is managing to accelerate revenue growth north of >30% y/y, which is an incredible feat at its scale. Large and expansive TAM, coupled with healthy cross-sell potential. Though Cloudflare is often bucketed alongside rivals in the cybersecurity sector like Zscaler ( ZS ), its platform capabilities are quite broad, offering tools ranging from zero-trust network security, VPNs, email security, load balancing and routing, firewalls, CDN (content delivery network) services, and more. The company notes that its 2026 TAM is $196 billion (indicating its current penetration into the market is just over 1%), growing to $231 billion by 2028. Enterprise-oriented customer base. In 2025, the company's count of customers who generate more than $1 million in revenue grew 55% y/y. The company also has ~4,300 customers who generate >$100k in ARR. Still, there are still plenty of Greenfield expansion opportunities remaining, as Cloudflare only counts 38% of the Fortune 500 as customers. To me, the large concentration of enterprise customers makes churn/AI disruption far less likely for Cloudflare. Rule of 40. Cloudflare balances >30% y/y revenue growth alongside a mid-teens pro forma operating margin, and its long term operating model calls for further margin expansion via sales and marketing efficiencies. The company strikes a fantastic growth/profitability balance that is not common in the software sector. Stay long here: while Cloudflare certainly remains a premium stock, its execution compensates investors for paying that premium in a market that is prioritizing quality and safety. Cloudflare And The Blockchain: New Stablecoin Issuance On The Way One other catalyst that's worth mentioning: recently, reports have surfaced that Coinbase, alongside several other blockchain companies, will help Cloudflare issue a stablecoin to be used as payment ("gas") for its network. Cloudflare had initially teased plans to introduce a stablecoin, which it calls NET Dollar, in September. Its vision is to leverage this coin to power payments across an agentic-first web. Think about it this way: an AI agent can't easily access your bank account details or make payments using a credit card, but giving agents access to digital currency (such as NET dollar) helps to reduce friction in the new web. Cloudflare's stock has popped since news broke that Coinbase is joining in on the plan, since it gives Cloudflare's entry into stablecoins meaningful legitimacy. My take on this news: while I do think that enabling payments pushes Cloudflare into an attractive additional adjacent market and expands its TAM, we are also likely still several years away from full release and monetization of this technology. So while this is a meaningful longer-term catalyst for Cloudflare, I do think the buzz surrounding this initiative will fade. Focus on the company's near-term sales performance to drive your buy decision instead. Q4 Download Let's now go through Cloudflare's latest quarterly results in greater detail. The Q4 earnings summary is shown below: Cloudflare Q4 results (Cloudflare Q4 earnings deck) Cloudflare's revenue grew 34% y/y to $614.5 million, beating Wall Street's expectations of $591.3 million (+29% y/y) by a huge five-point margin. There are two core reasons why, fundamentally, I think Cloudflare is a true outlier in the software sector and deserves more of a pass for its high valuation. The first is the fact that revenue growth accelerated 3 points versus 31% y/y growth in Q3, which in turn accelerated 3 points versus 28% y/y growth in Q2. We can't underscore enough how rare this is in today's market. Most software companies, despite touting AI advances and new product releases, are facing struggles with higher churn, longer deal cycle timing, and macro headwinds. Cloudflare isn't facing any of these issues. As previously mentioned, it's signing up large >$1 million customers at a rapid clip, now counting 269 such customers in its base (+55% y/y). These customers also tend to have longer-term horizons and higher expansion potential, which is amply demonstrated in the company's net retention rates improving one point sequentially (and 9 points y/y) to 120%: Cloudflare NRR trends (Cloudflare Q4 earnings deck) The company notes that the rise of vibe coding and agentic AI, which is leading to an explosion of applications and new software, is increasing the number of objects that now need to be secured, which is the main growth tailwind for the company. Per CEO Matthew Prince's remarks on the Q4 earnings call: When the cost of generating code drops to near 0, the volume of new applications explode. It's not a coincidence that most so-called vibe coding platforms are either built on Cloudflare Workers or have us as their preferred deployment target. We exited 2025 with more than 4.5 million human developers active on our platform. It's a lot more if we count their agents [...] Over the month of January alone, the number of weekly requests generated by AI agents more than doubled across the Cloudflare network. This is driving increased demand for our whole platform. This is where Cloudflare's scale becomes our moat. With more than 20% of the web already sitting behind Cloudflare's network, we are effectively the global control plane for the agentic Internet. That's creating a number of new growth opportunities, both with our traditional business as well as what we've begun calling Act 4, helping invent the future business model of the Internet." Where we do find Cloudflare a little lacking is in its margin progress. The company's pro forma operating margins held flat y/y at 14.6%, with full-year margins of 14.0% rising only 20bps y/y. Cloudflare operating margins (Cloudflare Q4 earnings deck) Guidance for FY26 also calls for margins to remain flattish at 14% in FY26. Cloudflare still remains in "Rule of 40" territory, but eventually we'll want to see gross margins back on track to recovery and for the company to generate more meaningful economies of scale. The company's long-term operating model, shown below, calls for pro forma operating margins to exceed 20%, and for FCF margins to roughly double as well to 25%+, and in order for Cloudflare to continue rallying, the company will have to show progress against these longer-term objectives. Cloudflare operating model (Cloudflare Q4 earnings deck) Risks, Valuation, And Key Takeaways To me, the number-one risk that Cloudflare stock faces is a rich valuation multiple, especially amid decimated valuations elsewhere in the software sector. At current share prices near $220, Cloudflare trades at a $77.91 billion market cap. Netting off the $4.10 billion of cash and $3.27 billion of debt on Cloudflare's most recent balance sheet gives us an enterprise value of $77.08 billion. For FY26, the company is guiding to $2.785-$2.795 billion in revenue, or growth barely decelerating to 28-29% y/y. It's also expecting a flat 14% pro forma operating margin. Cloudflare outlook (Cloudflare Q4 earnings deck) The stock's multiples sit at: 28x EV/FY26 revenue 197x FY26 P/E When established software companies like Salesforce ( CRM ) and Adobe ( ADBE ) are now suddenly trading at mid-teens P/E multiples, it's difficult to endorse buying Cloudflare at a >20x revenue multiple. That said, I take a similar argument here to buying Palantir: when revenue growth is constantly accelerating for Cloudflare (as it is now), near-term multiples are less meaningful since the stock will grow into its multiples very quickly. Cloudflare has proven that AI and the recent surge in application development are driving significant business for the company. To me, that's a justifiable reason to pay a premium for this stock: while many other software companies may see headwinds from AI (I think the "SaaSpocalypse" narrative overall is overblown, especially among larger enterprise customers with ingrained software platforms, but I certainly think many SMB/smaller customers will opt to vibe code their own tools rather than get locked into expensive software vendors). Amid the flight to safety and quality in today's stock market, I think Cloudflare remains an excellent bet, especially when the company is anchored by strong growth results in the near term plus the future potential from stablecoins and web payments on the horizon. Buy the recent dip here and hold out for a broad rebound.