The Platform Group Valuation Multiples

Microsoft is an American technology company headquartered in Redmond, Washington that sells software, cloud computing services, devices and games to consumers, businesses and governments. It was founded on 4 April 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen and has been led by chief executive Satya Nadella since February 2014. Its products include the Windows operating system, the Microsoft 365 productivity suite, the Azure cloud platform, the Copilot AI assistant, Xbox consoles and games, the LinkedIn professional network, the GitHub developer platform and the Bing search engine. In the fiscal year to 30 June 2026 revenue rose 18% to $331.8 billion, operating income reached $155.2 billion and net income $133.7 billion; Azure revenue passed $100 billion for the first time and Microsoft 365 Copilot exceeded 30 million paid seats. The company earns money from cloud subscriptions and consumption, software licences, advertising, and hardware and game sales, and employs about 223,000 people. Major acquisitions include LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016 and Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in 2023, and it is a major investor in OpenAI under a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar partnership announced in January 2023.

Alphabet is a technology holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. It was created on October 2, 2015 through a restructuring of Google, which became its largest subsidiary, and it is controlled by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The group earns most of its income from advertising on Google Search, YouTube and its ad network, and it also sells cloud computing services, subscriptions and consumer hardware. Other business units, grouped as Other Bets, include the autonomous driving company Waymo, the life sciences company Verily and the research lab Google DeepMind. Alphabet also holds equity stakes in artificial intelligence, space and energy companies and invests through its own venture arms GV and CapitalG. It has grown through acquisitions of software, hardware and cloud security businesses. Its shares are listed on the Nasdaq under the tickers GOOGL and GOOG.

Amazon is an American technology and retail company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with a second headquarters in Arlington County, Virginia. It runs the amazon.com online store and marketplace for third-party sellers, the Amazon Prime subscription programme, which had 200 million subscribers worldwide in 2021, and Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing unit launched in 2002 that rents data storage and computing power to companies. It also sells Echo, Kindle and Fire devices, distributes video, music and audiobooks through Prime Video, MGM+, Amazon Music, Twitch and Audible, and owns the Whole Foods Market grocery chain, Ring, IMDb and the self-driving car developer Zoox. Amazon earns revenue from product sales, seller commissions and fulfilment fees, subscriptions, cloud services and advertising. It reported revenue of US$716.9 billion and net income of US$77.7 billion in 2025 with about 1,576,000 employees, making it the world's largest company by revenue as of 2026 and the second-largest private employer in the United States. Jeff Bezos founded the company as Cadabra on July 5, 1994, in Bellevue, Washington, as an online bookstore and renamed it Amazon that November. Bezos, who owns about 8.8% of the shares, became executive chairman in July 2021, when former AWS chief Andy Jassy became chief executive.

Palantir is an artificial intelligence, analytics, and automated decision-making company that leverages data to drive efficiency across its clients' organizations. The firm serves commercial and government clients via its Foundry and Gotham platforms, respectively. Palantir works only with entities in Western-allied nations and reserves the right not to work with anyone that is antithetical to Western values. The company was founded in 2003 and went public in 2020.

Cisco Systems is a United States networking technology company headquartered in San Jose, California. It develops and sells routers, switches, security products, collaboration systems and software used to connect and manage digital networks. The company serves enterprises, telecommunications providers, public-sector organizations and smaller businesses worldwide. Revenue comes from hardware product sales, software subscriptions, licensing and technical support services. Cisco agreed to acquire CAIS Software Solutions and its IPORT technology in 2000 to strengthen products for property-based broadband access. The company is publicly listed and operates globally through direct sales and partner channels, with products spanning campus, data-center, wide-area and Internet infrastructure.

Oracle is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas, having moved its head office from Redwood Shores, California, in December 2020. It was co-founded on June 16, 1977, in Santa Clara, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates as Software Development Laboratories, and took its name from its flagship Oracle Database. Oracle sells database software, enterprise applications including enterprise resource planning, human capital management, customer experience and supply chain software, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and hardware to businesses and governments. It acquired Sun Microsystems and, in June 2022, Cerner for $28.3 billion, which now forms Oracle Health. In January 2025 Oracle joined OpenAI, SoftBank and MGX in the Stargate AI infrastructure venture, and in September 2025 it signed a $300 billion contract with OpenAI for 4.5 gigawatts of capacity over five years. For the quarter ended November 2025 it reported revenue of $14.1 billion, with cloud infrastructure revenue up 68% to $4.1 billion and remaining performance obligations of $130 billion. It employed 141,000 full-time staff in May 2026, and Clay Magouyrk and Mike Sicilia succeeded Safra Catz as co-CEOs, with Ellison as chairman and chief technology officer.

Palo Alto Networks is a platform-based cybersecurity vendor with product offerings covering network security, cloud security, and security operations. The California-based firm has more than 80,000 enterprise customers across the world, including more than three fourths of the Global 2000.

Founded in Germany in 1972 by former IBM employees, SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. Known as the leader in enterprise resource planning software, SAP’s portfolio also includes software for supply chain management, procurement, travel and expense management, and customer relationship management, among others. The company operates in more than 180 countries and has more than 400,000 customers, approximately 80% of which are small to medium-size enterprises.

Alibaba Group is a Chinese technology company headquartered in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, founded on 28 June 1999 by Jack Ma and 17 friends and students as the business-to-business marketplace Alibaba.com. It operates China's largest consumer marketplaces, Taobao (consumer-to-consumer) and Tmall (business-to-consumer), the global B2B site Alibaba.com and domestic wholesale platform 1688, alongside international e-commerce, Alibaba Cloud, the Cainiao logistics network, local consumer services and digital media and entertainment businesses, reorganised in 2023 into six business groups. It earns revenue mainly from merchant advertising and commissions on its marketplaces, plus cloud computing, logistics and direct sales. Early backers included Goldman Sachs, SoftBank and Investor AB, which invested $25 million in October 1999. Its September 2014 New York Stock Exchange IPO raised $25 billion, then the largest in history, giving it a market value of $231 billion, and in January 2018 it became the second Asian company to pass a $500 billion valuation. Joseph Tsai became chairman and Eddie Wu chief executive in 2023.

Dell Technologies is a broad information technology vendor, primarily supplying hardware to enterprises. It focuses on premium and commercial personal computers, as well as enterprise on-premises data center hardware. It holds top-three shares in its core markets of personal computers, peripheral displays, mainstream servers, and external storage. Dell has a robust ecosystem of component and assembly partners and also relies heavily on channel partners to fulfill its sales.

CrowdStrike is a cloud-native cybersecurity company specializing in security verticals such as endpoint, cloud workload, identity, and security operations. CrowdStrike's primary offering is its Falcon platform, which provides enterprises with a unified view to detect and respond to security threats across their IT infrastructure. The Austin, Texas-based firm was founded in 2011 and went public in 2019.

IBM (International Business Machines) is an American technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and operating in more than 175 countries. It sells hybrid-cloud and AI software, including Red Hat and the watsonx portfolio, IT consulting services, and infrastructure hardware such as IBM Z mainframes. Its customers are mainly large enterprises and governments, and it earns revenue from software subscriptions and licences, consulting and managed-services contracts, and hardware sales and financing. In 2025 IBM reported revenue of $67.5 billion, up 8%, with software up 11%, consulting up 2% and infrastructure up 12%, and free cash flow of $14.7 billion. The company was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed International Business Machines in 1924; it dominated mainframe computing with the System/360 and launched the IBM Personal Computer in 1981 before selling its PC division to Lenovo in 2005. More recently it bought Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019, spun off its managed infrastructure services unit as Kyndryl in 2021, and in December 2025 agreed to acquire data-streaming company Confluent for about $11 billion. Arvind Krishna is chairman and chief executive.

Shopify is a Canadian commerce software company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, that provides the cloud platform more than 5 million merchants use to run online stores and physical retail. Its subscription plans let businesses build storefronts, manage products, orders and inventory, and sell through point-of-sale systems, social networks and marketplaces, while merchant solutions add Shopify Payments, the Shop Pay accelerated checkout (more than 150 million users in 2024), shipping, merchant lending through Shopify Capital and an app store with more than 10,000 third-party apps. Revenue comes from monthly subscription fees and, increasingly, from payment processing and other transaction-linked services. Merchants processed US$292.3 billion of transactions on the platform in 2024, and 2025 revenue rose 30% to US$11.6 billion with net income of US$1.23 billion; the company had about 7,600 employees in 2025. Shopify was started by Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand and Scott Lake, and Lütke remains chief executive. It went public on May 21, 2015, trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange, moved its US listing from the NYSE to Nasdaq on March 31, 2025, and joined the Nasdaq-100 that May.

Salesforce provides enterprise cloud computing solutions. The company offers customer relationship management technology that brings companies and customers together. Its Customer 360 platform helps the group deliver a single source of truth, connecting customer data across systems, apps, and devices to help companies sell, service, market, and conduct commerce. It also offers Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing campaigns, Commerce Cloud as an e-commerce engine, the Salesforce Platform, which allows enterprises to build applications, and other solutions, such as MuleSoft for data integration.

S&P Global provides data and benchmarks to capital and commodity market participants. Its ratings business is the largest credit rating agency in the world and S&P's largest segment by profitability. S&P's largest segment by revenue is market intelligence, which provides desktop, data and advisory solutions, enterprise solutions, and credit/risk solutions mostly in the financial-services industry. S&P's other segments include energy (formerly commodity insights, this segment includes Platts and other data), mobility (Carfax), and indexes. S&P plans to spin off mobility in 2026.

ServiceNow Inc provides software solutions to structure and automate various business processes via a SaaS delivery model. The company primarily focuses on the IT function for enterprise customers. ServiceNow began with IT service management, expanded within the IT function, and more recently directed its workflow automation logic to functional areas beyond IT, notably customer service, HR service delivery, and security operations. ServiceNow also offers an application development platform as a service.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake is a fully managed platform that consolidates data hosted on different public clouds for centralized analytics and governance. Snowflake’s cloud-native architecture allows users to independently scale the compute and storage layers, providing customers with optimized performance at lower costs. The company’s data lake and data warehouse products support a variety of use cases, including business analytics, data engineering, and artificial intelligence. Snowflake is widely used by Fortune 2000 companies in financial services, media, and retail sectors.

Adobe provides content creation, document management, and digital marketing and advertising software and services to creative professionals and marketers for creating, managing, delivering, measuring, optimizing, and engaging with compelling content multiple operating systems, devices, and media. The company operates with three segments: digital media content creation, digital experience for marketing solutions, and publishing for legacy products (less than 5% of revenue).

Tata Consultancy Services is a leading global IT services provider based in Mumbai, India. Founded in 1968, it is one of the first companies to leverage a global delivery model that helps clients outsource their IT needs to offshore labor. The company boasts a wide range of offerings, including IT consulting, managed services, and business process outsourcing.

Cloudflare is a software company based in San Francisco, California, that offers security and web performance offerings by utilizing a distributed, serverless content delivery network, or CDN. The firm’s edge computing platform, Workers, leverages this network by providing clients the ability to deploy and execute code without maintaining servers.

Intuit serves small and midsize businesses with accounting software QuickBooks and online marketing platform Mailchimp. The company also operates retail tax filing tool TurboTax, personal finance platform Credit Karma, and a suite of professional tax offerings for accountants. Founded in the mid-1980s, Intuit enjoys a dominant market share for small-to-midsize business accounting and self-serve tax filing in the US.

Fortinet is a platform-based cybersecurity vendor with product offerings covering network security, cloud security, zero-trust access, and security operations. The firm derives a majority of its revenue through sales of its subscriptions and support-based business. The California-based firm has more than 800,000 customers across the world.

Cadence Design Systems is a provider of electronic design automation software, intellectual property, and system design and analysis products. EDA software automates and aids in the chip design process, enhancing design accuracy, productivity, and complexity in a full-flow end-to-end solution. Cadence offers a portfolio of design IP, as well as system design and analysis products, which enables system-level analysis and verification solutions.

Synopsys is a technology company supplying engineering software and semiconductor intellectual property to companies designing chips and electronic systems. Its electronic design automation tools support the design, verification and implementation of integrated circuits. The company also provides reusable semiconductor IP, including interface, analog, embedded memory and other functional building blocks that customers incorporate into their own chips. Its customers are commercial engineering and product-development organisations across semiconductor and other technology markets. Revenue comes from licensing software and intellectual property and providing associated support, training and engineering services. Its portfolio also includes simulation and analysis technologies used to assess engineering designs and system behaviour. The business combines internally developed technologies with acquired capabilities, including the embedded memory and logic library portfolio obtained through its acquisition of Virage Logic in 2010.

Moody’s, along with S&P Ratings, is a leading provider of credit ratings on fixed-income securities. The ratings segment, Moody’s Investors Service, includes corporates, structured finance, financial institutions, and public finance ratings. MIS represents a majority of the firm’s profit and often (depending on bond issuance levels) a majority of the firm's revenue. The other segment, Moody’s Analytics, consists of decision solutions, research and insights, and data and information.

MercadoLibre is a publicly listed e-commerce and financial technology company founded in Buenos Aires in 1999 by Marcos Galperin. It operates an online marketplace, the Mercado Pago payments and credit business, the Mercado Envios logistics network and an advertising unit across eighteen Latin American countries. The company is incorporated in Delaware, trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol MELI and has its headquarters in Montevideo, Uruguay. It reported revenues of 28.9 billion dollars for 2025 and operating income of 3.2 billion dollars, with about 123,670 employees. Its commerce and fintech services reached 131 million unique buyers over the twelve months to the second quarter of 2026. The company has grown through acquisitions of classifieds portals, logistics and payments businesses and through minority investments made partly through its corporate venture fund.

Datadog is a cloud-native company that focuses on analyzing machine data. The firm's product portfolio, delivered via software as a service, enables clients to monitor and analyze their entire information technology infrastructure, from servers to applications and Python scripts. Datadog's platform can ingest and analyze large amounts of machine-generated data in real time, allowing clients to utilize it for a variety of applications throughout their businesses to ensure uptime and latency objectives.

AppLovin is a vertically integrated advertising technology company that serves as a demand-side platform for advertisers, a supply-side platform for publishers, and an exchange that facilitates transactions between the two. About 80% of AppLovin’s revenue comes from the DSP, AppDiscovery, while the remainder comes from the SSP, Max. AppLovin’s primary tool for future growth is Axon 2, an ad optimizer within the DSP that lets advertisers place ads based on specified return thresholds.

RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers in various industries. The company serves sectors such as science and medical research, risk management, and legal. In addition, RELX organizes large-scale digital and face-to-face events such as industry trade shows. Around 60% of revenue is generated in North America and about 20% in Europe.

Strategy Inc is a bitcoin treasury company and a provider of business intelligence services. It is designed to provide investors varying degrees of economic exposure to Bitcoin by offering a range of securities, including equity and fixed-income instruments. The company also provides industry AI-powered enterprise analytics software. It has one reportable operating segment: the Software Business, which is engaged in the design, development, marketing, and sales of the company's enterprise analytics software platform through cloud subscriptions and licensing arrangements and related services (i.e., product support, consulting, and education). Geographically, the company operates in EMEA, U.S. and Other Regions, of which maximum revenue is derived from U.S..

Founded in 1982, Autodesk is a multinational software company best known for pioneering computer-aided design, or CAD, with its AutoCAD product. Nowadays, Autodesk provides design software for a variety of verticals, including architecture & construction, manufacturing, and media & entertainment. Autodesk products have been used in some of the world's most iconic landmarks, like Burj Khalifa, and well-known movie titles like Avatar.

Idexx Laboratories primarily develops, manufactures, and distributes diagnostic products, equipment, and services for pets and livestock. Its key product lines include single-use canine and feline test kits that veterinarians can employ in the office, benchtop chemistry and hematology analyzers for test-panel analysis on-site, reference lab services, and tests to detect and manage disease in livestock. The firm also offers vet practice management software and consulting services to animal hospitals. Idexx derives roughly 35% of its revenue from outside the United States.

Constellation Software is an acquirer, manager, and developer of vertical market software, or VMS, businesses globally. VMS differentiates from horizontal software in that it provides mission critical solutions within a specific industry for customers in a particular market. Constellation operates through a decentralized model in which each business operates as its own independent entity. Managers of individual businesses are incentivized to optimize their business for returns on invested capital and revenue growth. Excess cash generated by the individual businesses is repatriated to portfolio managers who focus on allocating as much capital as possible on new acquisitions. As of 2025, Constellation consisted of over 1,000 individual businesses and 64,000 employees.

Veeva is the global leading supplier of cloud-based software solutions for the life sciences industry. The company’s best-of-breed offerings address operating and regulatory requirements for customers ranging from small, emerging biotechnology companies to departments of global pharmaceutical manufacturers. The company leverages its domain expertise to improve the efficiency and compliance of the underserved life sciences industry, displacing large, highly customized and dated enterprise resource planning systems that have limited flexibility. Its two main products are Veeva CRM, a customer relationship management platform for companies with a salesforce, and Veeva Vault, a content management platform that tackles various functions within any life sciences company.

Workday is a software company that offers human capital management, financial management, and business planning solutions for enterprises. Known for being a cloud-only software provider, Workday was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Pleasanton, California.

Roper Technologies is a holding company focused on acquiring, managing, and developing niche market-leading technology businesses. The company operates a decentralized business model whereby each portfolio company operates independently from the others. Roper positions itself as a free cash flow compounder, whereby excess free cash flow generated by its portfolio businesses is repatriated to the parent company, which is then utilized to acquire additional businesses. Presently, the company operates 30 distinct businesses with over three-fourths of the revenue coming from software products and over two-thirds of revenue coming from recurring and reoccurring sources.

Atlassian produces software that helps teams work together more efficiently and more effectively. The company provides project planning and management software, collaboration tools, and service desk solutions. Atlassian was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.

Iqvia is the result of the 2016 merger of Quintiles, a leading global contract research organization, and IMS Health, a leading healthcare data and analytics provider. The research and development segment focuses primarily on providing outsourced late-stage clinical trials for pharmaceutical, device, and diagnostic firms. The technology and analytics segment provides aggregated information and technology services to clients in the healthcare industry, including pharmaceutical companies, providers, payers, and policymakers, as well as data and analytics capabilities for clinical trials, including virtual trials. The company also has a small contract sales business.

Paychex is a technology company providing human capital management solutions, enabling clients to better implement payroll, talent, time, tax, and benefits administration. It has a diverse set of product offerings addressing client needs. Aside from its traditional cloud-based payroll and HCM software offering, which accounts for close to half of total revenue, the company provides outsourcing options. Paychex's administrative service organization and professional employer organization accounts generate over 40% of sales. The balance of revenue is generated through retirement services, insurance solutions, and other products. In fiscal 2025, the company had 800,000 clients and almost 2.5 million worksite employees across its ASO and PEO.

HCL Technologies Ltd provides enterprises with IT solutions. It focuses on offering Digital, Internet of Things, Cloud, Automation, Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Management, and Engineering services to solve business problems for clients. It offers solutions to a variety of industries, including Financial Services, Public Services, Consumer Services, Healthcare, and Manufacturing. It operates in three segments: IT and Business Services, Engineering and R&D Services, and HCL Software. The firm emphasizes consultation services for firms, intending to offer them digital and design solutions. The majority of the firm's revenue comes from the IT and Business Services segment. Geographically, it derives maximum revenue from the USA, and the rest from Europe, India, and the Rest of the world.

Nebius is a vertically integrated cloud provider focusing on AI and high-performance computing. It is a carve-out of the previous Russian tech firm Yandex, following the Russian sanctions since the Ukraine-Russia war. Nebius designs and operates its own data centers and servers across Europe and the US, with a total capacity of several hundred megawatts. In September 2025, Microsoft became a major Nebius client under a multiyear $17 billion revenue agreement to provide computing capacity.

Dassault Systèmes is a leading provider of computer-assisted design and product lifecycle management software, serving customers like Boeing and Volkswagen throughout the production process. The company’s flagship product, Catia, primarily serves the transportation, industrial equipment, and aerospace and defense industries. In life sciences, Dassault’s Medidata cloud platform optimizes clinical trial efficiency and is the leader in electronic data capture.

Zscaler is a publicly listed cloud security software company founded in 2007 and headquartered in California. Its Zero Trust Exchange is a cloud-native platform that securely connects users, devices, applications and workloads without placing them on a traditional corporate network. The company sells subscription access to services for internet access security, private application access, data protection, cloud workload protection and digital experience monitoring. Zscaler primarily serves enterprises and public-sector organizations that are modernizing networks and moving applications and data to cloud environments. Its platform processes hundreds of billions of transactions per day and the company reports more than 11,000 customers, including over 40% of the Forbes Global 2000. Zscaler went public on Nasdaq under the ticker ZS in 2018. The business earns recurring software-as-a-service subscription and support revenue from organizations using its security cloud.

NetApp Inc is a provider of enterprise data management and storage solutions. The company's segments include Hybrid Cloud and Public Cloud. It generates maximum revenue from the Hybrid Cloud segment. The Hybrid Cloud segment offers a portfolio of storage management and infrastructure solutions that help customers recast their traditional data centers with the power of the cloud. This portfolio is designed to operate with public clouds to unlock the potential of hybrid, multi-cloud operations. Hybrid Cloud is composed of software, hardware, and related support, as well as professional and other services. Geographically, the company generates the majority of its revenue from the United States, Canada and Latin America (Americas).

GE HealthCare Technologies is a leading medical technology firm with leading market share in imaging and ultrasound equipment. The company reports four major segments: imaging (45% of revenue), advanced visualization solutions (26%), patient care solutions (15%), and pharmaceutical diagnostics (14%). The company’s sales are geographically diverse, with the United States, EMEA, China, and the rest of the world accounting for 46%, 26%, 11%, and 17% respectively. We estimate approximately half of its revenue is recurring, which consists of servicing (about one third of revenue), pharmaceutical diagnostics (about 10%-15%), and digital solutions (just over 5%).

Kuehne+Nagel is a global transportation and logistics company founded in Switzerland in 1890. Kuehne+Nagel is the second-largest sea freight forwarder globally and will hold a top-three spot in air freight. Sea freight has traditionally accounted for the largest part of the business, contributing 40% of the group's revenue in 2024. The company aims to become a more balanced, fully integrated freight forwarder, continually improving its end-to-end offering to clients.

Okta is a cloud-native security company that focuses on identity and access management. The San Francisco-based firm went public in 2017 and focuses on two key client stakeholder groups: workforces and customers. Okta’s workforce offerings enable a company’s employees to securely access its cloud-based and on-premises resources. The firm’s customer offerings allow its clients’ customers to securely access the client’s applications.

Twilio is a cloud-based communications platform-as-a-service company offering communication building blocks that allow for a fully customized customer engagement experience spanning voice, video, chat, and SMS messaging. It does this through various application programming interfaces and prebuilt solution applications aimed at improving customer engagement. The company leverages its Super Network, a global network of carrier relationships, to facilitate high-speed, cost-effective communication.