SaaSmageddon Survivors: 5 Top Software Stocks to Buy
In early 2026, Wall Street decided enterprise software companies — also known as SaaS companies, which stands for Software as a Service — were going to die.
Traders at Jefferies coined it the “SaaSpocalypse,” a roughly $2 trillion wipeout across enterprise software stocks built on a single, simple and terrifying idea: If artificial intelligence (AI) agents can do the work that software seats enable, nobody needs the seats anymore. If 10 AI agents can do the work of 100 sales reps, you don’t need 100 CRM licenses — you need 10.
That’s a 90% haircut to a business model the entire SaaS industry was built on, and for a few violent months, the market priced it in across the board — in good businesses and bad ones alike. The mood was sell first, ask questions later.
Sign up for Kiplinger’s Free Newsletters
Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice on investing, taxes, retirement, personal finance and more – straight to your e-mail.
Profit and prosper with the best of expert advice – straight to your e-mail.
For many of the names, the market was right to sell. HubSpot (HUBS), Atlassian (TEAM), and ZoomInfo (GTM) were the textbook cases. These companies offered tools for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) with low switching costs, doing exactly the kind of mechanical, repeatable work an AI agent handles natively, with no meaningful data moat to defend the seat count.
Those stocks got hit and mostly stayed hit, because the bear case wasn’t a panic — it was a correct read of the business.
But the five stocks below are the other half of the story: names that got dragged down by the same indiscriminate selling, and then did something the market didn’t initially price in; they turned AI adoption into their biggest growth driver instead of their biggest threat.
They didn’t survive SaaSmageddon by hiding from the AI disruption narrative. They survived by hijacking it, and in some cases by more than doubling off their 2026 lows.
Here’s the snapshot, then the breakdown, survivor by survivor. Data is as of August 24, 2026.
|
Ticker |
Share price |
Market value |
Percent off 52-week low |
YTD return through August 24 |
Next catalyst |
|
CRWD |
$190.68 |
$194.1 billion |
122.5% |
62.7% |
August 26 |
|
PANW |
$350.90 |
$285.3 billion |
151.4% |
90.5% |
September 1 |
|
AXON |
$597.59 |
$48.5 billion |
76.3% |
5.2% |
Early November |
|
SNOW |
$322.78 |
$111.98 billion |
172.8% |
47.2% |
September 2 |
|
RBRK |
$98.04 |
$20.2 billion |
132.5% |
28.2% |
August 27 |
CrowdStrike: The cleanest flip
(Image credit: Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
- Share price: $190.67
- Market value: $194.1 billion
- Next catalyst: Fiscal 2027 Q2 earnings on Wednesday, August 26
How it got caught: CrowdStrike (CRWD) was as exposed as anyone to SaaSmageddon logic on paper — a premium-multiple, subscription-based security platform, exactly the profile the panic targeted first. Shares fell as low as $85.68 this year before the turn.
The flip: CrowdStrike is the cleanest example of a stock that got dragged into the panic and then personally rewrote the narrative. CEO George Kurtz reframed AI cybersecurity risk on two tracks: enterprises need cybersecurity to deploy AI safely in the first place, and AI itself is creating entirely new “greenfield attack surfaces” — neoclouds, GPU clusters, agentic workloads — that didn’t exist a few years ago. Both tracks point in the same direction: more spend on CrowdStrike’s Falcon platform, not less.
On the June earnings call, Kurtz connected the dots even more explicitly, tying the timing of Anthropic’s Mythos model launch directly to the acceleration in enterprise security buying he was seeing in his own pipeline.
The numbers back it up. CrowdStrike posted record net-new ARR (annual recurring revenue) of $255.8 million in its fiscal 2027 first quarter (+32% year over year), pushing the company’s year-ending ARR to $5.51 billion, up 24% from the year prior.
Falcon Flex accounts — the company’s land-and-expand subscription model — now exceed $1.9 billion, more than double where they stood a year ago.
The cybersecurity stock is up roughly 63% year to date, and briefly touched an intraday record above $227 in mid-August. Plus, the company’s Fal.Con 2026, its annual user conference, sold out faster than any prior year — a small but telling demand signal ahead of its late-August earnings print.
The outlook: Wall Street sees CrowdStrike revenues rising 23% in fiscal 2027, another 22% in fiscal 2028, 21% in fiscal 2029, and 21% again in fiscal 2030 — so this is a durable 20% revenue grower.
EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margins are also expected to expand from the high-20s to the low-30s in the next few years, so we’re talking a 25%+ compounded EBITDA grower here.
The valuation isn’t cheap (107 times forward EBITDA estimates), but that multiple makes sense for a high-growth, wide-moat SaaSmageddon survivor. Estimates keep rising, and the chart looks great, so this one likely keeps powering higher.
Palo Alto Networks: The platform play
(Image credit: Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto)
- Share price: $350.89
- Market Cap: $285.3 billion
- Next catalyst: Fiscal Q4 earnings on Tuesday, September 1
How it got caught: Palo Alto Networks (PANW) fell to $139.57 this year during the broader software drawdown, dragged alongside its cybersecurity peers even though its underlying growth never actually broke stride. PANW is a case study in how indiscriminate the SaaSmageddon selling really was.
The flip: Where CrowdStrike sells best-of-breed point protection, Palo Alto sells consolidation — the pitch being that large enterprises don’t want to manage a dozen security vendors when AI has already made their attack surface more complex.
Palo Alto CEO Nikesh Arora has been direct about it: frontier AI compresses attack timelines from months to minutes, which raises the value of an integrated platform rather than lowering it. That’s the same SaaSmageddon-flip logic as CrowdStrike, delivered through a bundling strategy rather than a best-in-class one.
Jefferies analyst Joseph Gallo captured the broader dynamic well, noting that investors are rotating toward large-scale platform leaders seen as more resilient amid AI-driven disintermediation, rather than smaller point solutions.
Next-gen security ARR reached $8.1 billion in fiscal Q3, up 60% year over year, with remaining performance obligations up 36% to $18.4 billion — a better read on forward demand than any single quarter of revenue.
The stock is up 90% year to date and has outpaced even CrowdStrike’s run over the same stretch.
The outlook: Much like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks is set up as a roughly 25% compounded EBITDA grower over the next several years, powered by low-20s revenue growth and mild EBITDA margin expansion.
But its valuation is much more attractive than CrowdStrike, with PANW trading at just 62 times forward EBITDA for a similar high-growth, wide-moat company profile. If CrowdStrike looked good, Palo Alto Networks arguably looks great.
Axon Enterprise: The wild card
(Image credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
- Share price: $597.28
- Market value: $48.5 billion
- Next catalyst: Reported Q2 earnings on August 5; its next print is in early November
How it got caught: Axon Enterprise (AXON) isn’t cybersecurity — it’s public-safety SaaS, i.e., emergency dispatch, incident reporting and so on — and that’s exactly why its inclusion here matters: it proves the survivor pattern isn’t sector-specific.
We flagged Axon ourselves back in the depths of the panic as showing “technical weakness plus SaaSmageddon risk,” and shares bottomed at $339.01 this year before the AI story took over the narrative entirely.
The flip: Axon’s AI Era Plan initiative bundles Draft One (AI report writing), real-time translation, and redaction tools on top of its core TASER and body-camera hardware. It has pushed premium per-officer pricing from $99 a year in 2017 to $569 a year today, with the AI Era Plan alone adding $199 per user annually.
AI product revenue grew over 700% year-over-year in Q1, AI bookings were up 140%, and Chief Financial Officer Brittany Bagley noted more than a third of software revenue now comes from offerings beyond the core Evidence platform. Real-world traction backs the pitch: Rowlett Police Department reported a 75% cut in evidence-redaction time, and Fort Collins PD saw a 67% reduction in related workload.
The second quarter, reported on August 5, delivered the company’s 10th consecutive quarter of 30%+ top-line growth, with revenue up 35% to $904.3 million and full-year guidance raised to 32% to 34% growth, backed by $15.1 billion in future contracted bookings.
Shares jumped as much as 17.8% on the guidance raise, and counter-drone subsidiary Dedrone crossed $100 million in revenue for the first time, with bookings there up 500% year over year.
The outlook: Axon has sustained 30%+ revenue growth every year since 2022. With new AI products in the mix, we don’t see any reason why that would change going forward. Coupled with continued albeit mild EBITDA margin expansion from economies of scale and pricing power — Axon is the only game in town for a lot of their products — this is a 40%+ compounded EBITDA grower for the next several years.
And that is fantastic growth profile for a tech stock that is now just trading at 43 times forward EBITDA – one of its lowest valuation multiples of the last five years. Of all the SaaSmageddon survivors, AXON may be the most attractively undervalued.
Snowflake: Not a reversal, but a reset
(Image credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
- Share price: $322.78
- Market value: $111.98 billion
- Next catalyst: Fiscal 2027 Q2 earnings on Wednesday, September 2
How it got caught: The bear case for Snowflake (SNOW) during SaaSmageddon was structurally the scariest of the five: the idea that AI would let enterprises query their own data directly, cutting the data warehouse out of the loop entirely. Shares fell to $118.30 this year on that fear before the recovery began.
The flip: What actually happened is close to the opposite: Snowflake made itself the governance layer AI agents need to run safely on enterprise data, rather than something those agents route around.
Adoption of Snowflake’s Cortex AI solution is the tell — roughly 9,100 accounts now use Snowflake AI, up from 7,300 last quarter, and Snowflake Intelligence (its agentic AI product) nearly doubled its customer base to 2,500.
The newly launched Cortex AI Gateway extends that further, positioning Snowflake as the control point for how enterprises authenticate, secure, and manage cost across both first- and third-party AI agents — a governance pitch that got a boost in late July and early August as partners Alteryx, Aembit and 1Password integrated directly into the ecosystem.
The underlying numbers have been consistently strong: product revenue of $1.3 billion in the most recently reported quarter (+34% year over year), remaining performance obligations of $9.2 billion (+38%), net revenue retention stabilized at 126%, and 779 customers now generating more than $1 million in trailing 12-month product revenue, up 29% year over year. Management’s own long-range narrative projects $10.1 billion in revenue and $792.7 million in earnings by 2029.
Shares are up 22% in the past month alone.
The outlook: Earnings-per-share (EPS) estimates on Snowflake have been flying since analysts realized this is an AI winner. Since the start of the year, Snowflake’s consensus fiscal 2027 EPS estimates are up 20%. Consensus FY2028 EPS estimates have also risen 20%.
Into 2030, Wall Street now sees Snowflake growing revenues at a steady 25%+ clip, with EBITDA margins rising from 17% this year to 22% by the end of decade, for an EBITDA compounded annual growth rate of nearly 33%.
That is a great growth profile, and it more than compensates for the rich valuation multiple here (99 times forward EBITDA estimates), especially since estimates keep rising and the growth profile keeps getting better.
SNOW stock looks good for the rest of the year — and beyond.
Rubrik: The direct Anthropic play
(Image credit: Jaque Silva/NurPhoto)
- Share price: $98.04
- Market value: $20.2 billion
- Next catalyst: Fiscal 2027 Q2 on Thursday, August 27
How it got caught: Rubrik (RBRK) is the smallest name here, and it fell the hardest in relative terms — down to $42.25 this year, a level that reflected both SaaSmageddon-era selling and its own pre-profitability, GAAP-loss-making profile. This made it an easy target once the market decided to punish anything unprofitable and subscription-based at once.
The flip: Rubrik is also the most direct Anthropic tie-in. The company has genuine access to Claude’s Mythos Research Preview through Project Glasswing (an Anthropic security project), using it for AI-powered vulnerability detection. And it has integrated Rubrik Agent Cloud with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.
Like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto, Rubrik’s pitch is that AI adoption makes data resilience and identity protection more essential, not less — reinforced by its Agent Identity product, which manages and controls AI agents’ access.
CEO Bipul Sinha has been explicit that the company sees itself less as a backup vendor now and more as the “security and AI operations” company.
Fiscal 2027 Q1 results showed 39% year-over-year revenue growth to $387.1 million and subscription ARR up 32% to $1.57 billion, with net revenue retention above 120% and record net-new ARR.
Loop Capital initiated coverage on the AI stock with a Buy rating and $100 target on August 4; KeyBanc raised its target to $100 on July 16; BMO raised to $98 on July 10; and BTIG lifted its target to $109 from $91. That’s four separate price-target increases in about a month, all landing in a tight $98–$109 band just above the current price.
The outlook: The top-line momentum here is indisputable (this is a steady low-to-mid-20s revenue grower with a long runway ahead), but the most impressive thing about RBRK is how they are using AI to dramatically improve efficiency and internal margins.
This was a company that was running consistent losses until recently. And now, it is reporting positive EBITDA, profits and free cash flow, with all of them scaling rapidly (free cash flow is expected to rise about 40% this year and another roughly 40% next year).
This massively successful profitability ramp is exactly the sort of story that Wall Street will latch onto amidst SaaSmageddon fears — and it is why RBRK stock should continue to head higher.
The bottom line on these SaaSmageddon survivors
SaaSmageddon wasn’t wrong about the threat — AI genuinely is changing how enterprise software gets bought and used.
It was wrong to assume every seat-based company would be a casualty of that change instead of a beneficiary.
CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Axon, Snowflake and Rubrik all found the same escape hatch: make the platform the thing that makes AI safe, governed or actionable, and the seat count stops mattering as much as the platform does. Meanwhile, the names that didn’t find that escape hatch — HubSpot, Atlassian, ZoomInfo among them — are the control group. They prove the difference wasn’t luck. It was whether the business model had a second act available at all.
