Snapshot
- Ticker: RBRK (NYSE)
- Bucket: Software in the AI Crosshairs
- Q1 2026 position: 566,454 shares, $27.7M, 0.55% of 13F — not top-20
- HQ: Palo Alto, California
- What it does: Data security and cyber-resilience platform — backup, ransomware recovery and data threat analytics delivered as subscription software.
Business Overview
Rubrik pivoted from enterprise backup appliances to a subscription “Zero Trust data security” platform: it protects enterprise data across data center, cloud and SaaS, and monetizes recovery and cyber-resilience (its sweet spot is getting companies back up after ransomware). Growth is among the best in public software: FY2026 (ended January 2026) revenue was 886.5M in FY2025; Q4 FY2026 revenue was 1.46B (up 34%) with a record 70.1M of quarterly free cash flow. Customers with >$100K subscription ARR grew 25% to 2,805. The company has also been pushing into AI-adjacent territory (data security posture for AI pipelines, agent governance, and its Predibase acquisition for model serving).
Why Atreides Owns It
Rubrik sits on the defensible side of Baker’s software framework: security and resilience attach to data at runtime, are hard for a thin AI-agent startup to displace, and arguably gain importance as agents proliferate (“anything you can verify, you can automate” cuts both ways — automated attacks raise the value of automated recovery). The fund’s software sleeve churned violently across 2025, but Rubrik was held for four straight quarters — alongside Palo Alto and Akamai-type re-entries in Q1 2026, it reflects a preference for runtime/data-plane software over seat-based front-office apps. The Q1 2026 trim (and value decline from ~49 implied per share) tracks the stock’s sharp derating rather than a thesis change, though Atreides clearly cut rather than added into the weakness.
Position History
| Quarter | Type | Shares/Notional | Value | % of 13F |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 2024 | — | not held | — | — |
| Q1 2025 | — | not held | — | — |
| Q2 2025 | Common | 471,280 | $42,221,975 | 1.17% |
| Q3 2025 | Common | 752,752 | $61,913,852 | 1.21% |
| Q4 2025 | Common | 895,029 | $68,451,818 | 0.84% |
| Q1 2026 | Common | 566,454 | $27,739,252 | 0.55% |
Built steadily over three quarters (471K → 753K → 895K shares), then cut ~37% in Q1 2026 as the stock roughly halved — the position went from a ~1.2% holding to a residual 0.55%. The pattern suggests holding conviction on the business but reduced sizing after the multiple compressed along with the rest of high-growth software.
Risks
- Stock still trades at a premium multiple of ARR for a company that is barely free-cash-flow positive on an annual basis; further multiple compression is the live risk, as Q1 2026 showed.
- Backup/recovery is contested: Veeam, Cohesity-Veritas, Commvault and hyperscaler-native tooling all compete.
- Net-new ARR records must continue against a much larger base; deceleration from 48% revenue growth is mathematically inevitable.
- If AI agents commoditize security operations broadly, even data-plane software is not fully exempt from Baker’s margin-pressure thesis.