Seven of the most-watched names in public B2B reported in the last few days. Growth is back for many:
- Twilio just hit its highest growth in three years, from single digits to 20%+, and accelerating.
- Atlassian jumped to 32% and the stock ripped 30% in a day.
- Datadog hit its first ever $1 billion quarter and the stock popped 28%.
- Cloudflare grew 34% AND announced a 1,100-person workforce cut to “go AI-first.”
- Palantir grew 85%, the fastest in its history as a public company. Shopify cleared $100B of GMV in a single quarter for the first time ever.
- while HubSpot and Shopify had a solid quarter, but didn’t show the forward acceleration the markets were hoping for. Both AI stories are still a work-in-progress.
The markets sent Datadog up +20%. And punished HubSpot -20%. Very bimodal.
Net net five clean reaccelerations. Two strong-but-not-yet AI stories. The AI-killing-B2B narrative is dead. But the AI-revenue-driven-reacceleration narrative is still selective.
Twilio: 5x Growth Rate in 18 Months
Twilio went from 4% growth in Q2 2024 to 20% in Q1 2026. CEO Khozema Shipchandler called it the highest revenue and gross profit growth in more than three years.
Inside the print:
- Revenue $1.41B, up 20% reported, 16% organic
- Voice grew 20%, the fastest in 19 quarters, driven by AI use cases
- Messaging accelerated to 25%
- NRR climbed to 114%, up from 107% a year ago
- Non-GAAP operating income up 31% YoY
- FY2026 guidance raised twice: organic growth now 9.5% to 10.5%, reported growth 14% to 15%
The AI tie is direct. Conversational Intelligence and Branded Calling are software add-ons that didn’t exist as growth drivers two years ago. AI-native companies are now meaningful messaging customers. Voice, the part of Twilio that everyone wrote off, is now the most accelerated line in the business because agents need to talk.
Atlassian: From “SaaSpocalypse Casualty” to +30% Stock Pop in One Print
Atlassian was one of the most-shorted narratives of the last six months. The stock fell from $232 to $56 on the thesis that AI agents would compress seats and hollow out collaboration software.
Then Q3 FY26 landed:
- Revenue $1.79B, up 32% YoY (the fastest in six quarters)
- Cloud revenue $1.13B, accelerated to 29% YoY
- RPO of $4.0B, up 37% YoY
- Service Collection crossed $1B in ARR, growing 30%+ YoY
- Largest-ever quarter of competitive displacements from a major ITSM provider
- Cloud NRR above 120% for the third consecutive quarter
One honest caveat. CFO James Chuong disclosed about $50M of pull-forward Data Center license revenue tied to the end-of-life announcement. Strip that out and you’re closer to high-20s, not 32%. Still a clear reacceleration.
The AI signal that matters: Rovo crossed 5M monthly active users, AI credit usage is growing 20%+ month-over-month, and customers using Rovo are growing their ARR at roughly 2x the rate of customers who aren’t. That’s a measurable revenue link, not a feature talking point. The market repriced the stock 30% in a day on that.
Datadog: The First $1B Quarter and the Biggest One-Day Pop Ever
Datadog reported with the cleanest “AI is real revenue” print on the comp set after Palantir.
Q1 2026:
- Revenue $1.006B, up 32% YoY (first ever billion-dollar quarter, fastest growth rate in 3 years)
- Beat consensus revenue by 4.9%, EPS by 18%
- Non-GAAP operating income $223M at 22% margin
- Operating cash flow $335M; free cash flow $289M (29% FCF margin)
- $100K+ ARR customers grew to ~4,550, up 21% YoY
- 5 products now over $100M in ARR; 3 more in the $50M-$100M range
- More than 50% of customers use 4+ products; nearly 1/3 use 6+
- Anthropic disclosed as the 8-figure AI customer signed in Q4
- FedRAMP High certification cleared, opening the federal market
- Q2 guide: $1.07B-$1.08B, ~30% YoY (above $995M consensus)
- FY 2026 guide raised by $240M to $4.32B at midpoint
One caveat. Sequential net new revenue in Q1 was about $53M, the softest of the last four quarters ($65M, $59M, $68M before it). Some of the YoY acceleration is the easy comp lapping a weak Q1 2025. But Q1 2026 sequential was still more than 2x the prior Q1 ($24M), and the Q2 guide implies sequential adds bouncing back to roughly $69M, right back in the trailing range. The AI-acceleration thesis looks real, but Q2 is the confirmation on whether the $1B quarter is the new run-rate or one strong comp.
Two things make this quarter matter beyond the headline:
- First, the AI tie is concrete: GPU Monitoring, an MCP Server, AI Agent Monitoring, LLM Experiments, Bits AI Security Agent. They have the dominant AI-native customer (Anthropic) on a multi-year deal. They added Sakana AI as a strategic partnership.
- Second, and more important: non-AI-native customer growth was 23% YoY in Q4 2025. The acceleration is broad-based, not just one or two giant AI workloads carrying the comp. The bear case for Datadog this year was customer concentration on a single AI-native account. Q1 broke it.
The stock is up roughly 28% intraday, the biggest single-day gain since IPO.
HubSpot: Held the Line. The Bears Were Wrong. But The AI Reacceleration Hasn’t Started Yet.
HubSpot was supposed to be the cleanest test of the SaaSpocalypse thesis. Per-seat business, mid-market, in the segment most exposed to “AI compresses seats.” Q4 2025 had landed at 18% constant-currency growth. Q1 was the moment.
The headline numbers look strong at first blush:
- Revenue ~$884M, up roughly 24% YoY as reported (beat the company’s 21% guide by ~3 points)
- EPS beat by ~10% over consensus
- Customer count tracking to ~298K, up ~16% YoY
- Breeze Customer Agent and Prospecting Agent both growing usage; Customer Agent ~60% of AI credit consumption
- Calculated billings durable
But looking at constant currency there was no real acceleration growth, and it stayed at ~19%, the same as prior 4+ quarters.
In constant currency, HubSpot has been pinned at 18% for five consecutive quarters with a 1-point bump in Q1. That’s not a V-shape. That’s a flat line. The reported “reacceleration” is mostly a USD-weakening story, not an AI-revenue story.
This is still a meaningful refutation of the bear case. The thesis was that AI seat compression would take HubSpot’s growth from low-20s into single digits over 18 months. That hasn’t happened. They’ve held 18% CC. That’s resilience worth respecting.
But “didn’t decline as predicted” and “reaccelerated on AI” are different things. The credits monetization is real but small. The Customer Agent and Prospecting Agent stats are activations and usage, not yet meaningful dollars. HubSpot’s stock dropped sharply after-hours despite the headline beat, and the market reaction tells you what to think: investors are not yet paying a multiple for AI-driven reacceleration here. They are paying a multiple for “stable, high-quality compounder that didn’t break.”
HubSpot still has to prove it.
Cloudflare: 34% Growth … and a 1,100-Person Workforce Cut on the Same Day
Cloudflare beat as well, and kept accelerating:
- Revenue $639.8M, up 34% YoY (beat $620-621M guide by ~$19M)
- GAAP loss from operations $62M; non-GAAP operating income $73.1M at 11% margin
- Free cash flow $84.1M, 13% of revenue (up from 11% prior year)
- Current RPO grew 34% YoY
- Cash and securities of $4.16B
- Q4 2025 already crossed 4,298 large customers ($100K+ ARR), with large customer revenue growing 42% YoY
That’s the third consecutive quarter of revenue acceleration after a 27% trough in early 2025. Matt Prince’s commentary captures it: “AI is driving a fundamental re-platforming of the Internet and a paradigm shift in how software is created and consumed; it’s shaping up to be the biggest tailwind we’ve ever seen in Cloudflare’s history.”
Then the second announcement landed. Cloudflare also disclosed a workforce reduction of approximately 1,100 people, roughly a quarter of the company, framed as “evolution to an agentic AI-first operating model.” Restructuring charges of $140M to $150M, mostly in Q2, plan complete by end of Q3.
The relevant point is what it signals about where this market is going. Cloudflare is not laying off because revenue is weak. Revenue just accelerated to 34%. They are laying off because they believe AI agents can do the work of those 1,100 people, and they want the operating leverage. Prince explicitly said: “we don’t just build and sell AI tools and platforms, we’re our own most demanding customer. With AI and agents now core parts of our workforce, the way we work at Cloudflare has fundamentally changed.”
This is the first time a major public B2B leader has paired a revenue acceleration print with a workforce cut of that magnitude on the same day, with AI-as-the-replacement explicitly named. It will not be the last.
Palantir: The Outlier of Outliers
Palantir is doing something no other public B2B company is doing right now. Q1 2026:
- Revenue $1.63B, up 85% YoY, the highest growth rate ever as a public company
- US revenue $1.28B, up 104% YoY (first time over 100%)
- US commercial $595M, up 133% YoY
- US government $687M, up 84% YoY (accelerating from 66% in Q4)
- Rule of 40 score of 145%
- 11 consecutive quarters of revenue acceleration
- FY2026 guide raised to 71% growth, $7.65B at the midpoint, 10 points above prior
Karp told CNBC he expects the US business, government and commercial combined, to double again in 2027.
You don’t need to love Palantir’s politics or its valuation to see what the data is showing. AIP is generating real, expanding contracts. Total contract value in US commercial hit a record. The deal count keeps climbing. This is the cleanest public proof point that “AI revenue” is a real category, not a slide.
Shopify: Very Strong. An AI Story. But It Still Has to Prove the Acceleration.
Shopify reported Tuesday morning. The headline was excellent:
- Revenue $3.17B, up 34% YoY (the strongest quarterly growth in over four years)
- GMV $100.7B, the first $100B+ quarter ever
- Merchant solutions revenue +39% (best in four years)
- Subscription solutions +21%
- Free cash flow $476M at a 15% margin
- Shop Pay penetration at 67%
Then the stock dropped almost 9% pre-market. Two reasons.
One: Q2 guide is high-twenties percentage growth, down from the 34% just printed. That’s a meaningful step-down in a market where investors are paying for acceleration, not strong-but-cooling.
Two: the AI commerce narrative is still mostly narrative. President Harley Finkelstein talked about Shopify’s edge in AI commerce. The agentic checkout, AI-powered storefronts, the merchant tooling. All real. But on the call there was no specific dollar figure tied to AI driving Q1’s growth. The growth came from where Shopify’s growth has come from for two years now: GMV expansion, payments penetration, international, and Shop Pay. All excellent. Not new.
Look at the chart line. Shopify has been pinned in the 27% to 34% band for seven straight quarters. The Q2 guide brings it back into that band. That isn’t a reacceleration story. That’s a beautifully executed compounder, with a strong AI roadmap, that hasn’t yet shown the AI is moving the revenue line. Shopify still has to prove it.
AI Isn’t Killing B2B, But You Sure Need to Grow Because of It
Three things the comp set above makes obvious.
1. The “AI is killing B2B” narrative peaked at the bottom. Six different companies, six different end markets, six different business models. All reaccelerated. Atlassian is the cleanest “we were wrong” stock chart, with Datadog and HubSpot right behind. The most aggressive bear case (HubSpot, the per-seat business everyone said couldn’t survive AI) just printed acceleration. The fear was overpriced.
2. Reacceleration shows up as a step-function, not a trend. Twilio sat in the 10% to 15% band for six straight quarters and then jumped to 20%. Atlassian sat at 21% to 23% for a year and then jumped to 32%. Datadog sat at 25% to 28% for six quarters and then jumped to 32%. HubSpot sat at 16% to 21% for five quarters and jumped to 24%. Cloudflare crept from 27% to 31% to 34%. Palantir is the only one with a smooth curve, and even that curve has been steepening sequentially. If you’re a founder waiting for “the AI revenue” to compound gradually into your numbers, you’re modeling the wrong shape. It will tend to land in one or two quarters.
3. AI products that can be tied to a measurable revenue lift get rewarded. The rest get a multiple haircut. Atlassian disclosed Rovo customers grow ARR at 2x non-Rovo customers. Twilio attributed voice acceleration directly to AI use cases. Datadog disclosed an 8-figure deal with Anthropic and 5 products over $100M ARR. HubSpot disclosed Customer Agent now drives ~60% of AI credit consumption. Cloudflare quantified its AI agent traffic doubling and is restructuring its own workforce on the strength of internal AI productivity. Palantir is essentially an AI revenue chart with a company attached. Shopify talked about AI as positioning. Six got rerated. Shopify got sold. The lesson for B2B leaders pricing AI right now is that “AI features” don’t move the multiple. AI revenue does.
The Bottom Seems In … For Those That Have Found How To Tap Into AI Budget
Will HubSpot, Salesforce, Monday and Shopify see true re-acceleration like Twilio, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Datadog and Palantir? Or will they struggle to acquire meaningful AI revenue?
We’ll see. For now at least, per seat pricing isn’t dead. Nor did vibe coding kill these leaders.
But, the agents are still coming.
