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Wednesday, October 21, 2026

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Fajasy on X

How much of the $400M of ARR that Boost Run $BRUN is targeting by December 31 is already signed? Five of its seven contracts with disclosed terms can count toward the $400M target, since the July order and Cohere, $160.7M/year combined, don’t start until 2027. If Thinking Machines Lab’s GPUs are fully running by December 31 and the June order starts on November 30, the five cover $300.6M (75.1%) of the target, leaving $99.4M for contracts without disclosed terms. For comparison, the Q2 deck’s deployment schedule had $0.4B of the then-$1.9B of TCV in production by the end of Q2, with all of it live by Q1 2027. From there, the deck shows another $0.4B of TCV going into production in Q3 and another $0.4B in Q4, a straight line to $1.2B by year-end that management calls consistent with the $400M+ ARR target. The deck’s footnote says the Q3 figure is a management estimate “interpolated from disclosed metrics,” so the actual climb will likely be lumpier, with the June order alone starting November 30. Cohere’s racks start in Q2 2027, right after the deck’s schedule ends, so even without a new contract, $BRUN has signed deployments lined up through mid-2027. $BRUN’s last ARR figure was $145M as of June 30, from the Q2 call, so the Q3 report (expected in mid-November) will be the first check on H2 2026. A straight-line climb from $145M (as of June 30) to $400M by December 31 would mean $136.3M of H2 2026 revenue, in line with the $127.9-137.9M needed to hit the $170-180M of 2026 revenue its October 8 prospectus amendment still estimates. By quarter, that climb works out to $52.2M of revenue in Q3 and $84.1M in Q4, up from $31.1M in Q2. In other words, the year-end target is mostly contracted, and the risk is getting the GPUs bought, financed, and running by December 31.
@StableBread

Fajasy on X

Founder and CEO Andrew Karos hasn’t reported a single sale of Boost Run $BRUN stock since the listing. He takes a $1.00/year salary, owns 44.6% of the shares, and controls 87% of the vote, so his pay comes almost entirely through the stock. Since my August update, the only open-market sales came from director Sean Goodrich, who holds his stake through Goodrich ILMJS LLC, an investor on Willow Lane’s side of the merger. Goodrich’s sales came after a forced warrant exercise. Once $BRUN closed at or above $18.00 on 20 of 30 trading days, Boost Run could redeem its warrants for $0.01 each, so after it called them on July 21, Goodrich paid $12.7M on August 19 to exercise his 1,101,986 warrants. He then sold 198,200 shares at $20.15 on August 27 and 500,000 at $14.00 on September 14 for $11.0M total, 86.8% of what the exercise cost him, and still holds 4,437,921 shares (8.2% of the Class A). So I don’t read the sales as a verdict on the business, since he sold about what the exercise cost him when he could have sold far more. Meanwhile, three executives have more stock coming. The compensation committee granted them 4.59M time-based restricted stock units (RSUs) on September 29, 5.5% of the shares outstanding. At the $16.65 grant-date price, the 4.59M RSUs are worth $76.4M, 42.5-45.0% of the $170-180M 2026 revenue estimate. Giving up 5.5% of the shares is expensive, but the grants give the CTO who runs all of $BRUN’s GPU deployments and the CFO who has to finance the GPUs a reason to stay through mid-2029. $BRUN still reports three material weaknesses, the most serious kind of gap in a company’s financial reporting controls. They’re in (1) IT general controls, (2) segregation of duties (keeping one person from handling a transaction end to end), and (3) the number of qualified accounting staff. $BRUN’s filing record hasn’t been clean either. Both 10-Qs came late, after notices of late filing on May 26 and August 14, and the original Q1 10-Q, filed June 1, called its disclosure controls effective until an amended Q1 10-Q on August 18 said they weren’t. I’m comfortable with the weaknesses for now, since (1) the S-4 (merger filing) disclosed all three before the merger, (2) the amendment didn’t change any reported numbers, and (3) $BRUN has hired a chief accounting officer, a COO, and a CIO to fix the gaps. But lenders, and any agency rating the parent-level debt $BRUN wants, will read the same filings.

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