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Saturday, October 31, 2026

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When the liquidity does not add up

Arbor Realty Trust’s dividend suspension is presented as creating $60 million of liquidity, raising questions about its ability to meet 2027 debt maturities.

ABR $2.2B
John Hempton's Newsletter 3 clicks

From X

@StableBread 1 click

Fajasy on X

AI labs and data labeling companies (firms that turn experts’ knowledge into training data for the labs) could make my $12-19M sale range for Nubeva Technologies $NBVAF (TSXV: $NBVA) look conservative. My previous write-up’s sale comps were five cybersecurity companies buying small startups that detect, stop, or recover from ransomware, and I valued a Nubeva sale at $12-19M, the low end of those deals. AI labs and data labeling companies would widen the set of buyers beyond cybersecurity companies, but I found none that has bought a ransomware recovery company like Nubeva. The closest deals were for a stake in a ransomware recovery company, malware data, and specialist teams: → Microsoft $MSFT: Made an equity investment in Veeam, a data protection and ransomware recovery company, in February 2025, as part of a partnership to build AI-based threat detection and other Microsoft AI services into Veeam’s products. → Google $GOOGL: Owns VirusTotal, a malware-scanning site it bought in 2012, and Mandiant, the incident-response firm it bought for $5.4B in 2022. Its experimental Sec-Gemini model, introduced in April 2025, draws on Mandiant’s threat intelligence data. → OpenAI: Agreed to buy Promptfoo in March 2026 for an undisclosed price. Promptfoo, which tests AI systems for security holes, was valued at $86M after its July 2025 funding round, per PitchBook. → Mercor (a data labeling company): Agreed to buy Deeptune, which builds practice environments for AI agents, in July 2026, months after Andreessen Horowitz led Deeptune’s $43M Series A. The two 2026 deals didn’t disclose prices, and Mandiant and Veeam are far larger businesses than Nubeva, so I can’t put a new number on a sale. Still, my $12-19M range is probably conservative now, since it only counted cybersecurity companies as buyers, and an AI lab or data labeling company would be paying for Nubeva’s engineers and model rather than its ~$500K of FY2026 revenue. But an AI buyer wouldn’t get patents on what it’s paying for. Nubeva’s patents would cover how it recovers files and how it detects hidden encryption, but it won’t patent its binary analysis (figuring out what malware programs do) at all, and CEO Randy Chou explained why: “Anything you patent, that means you have to show how you did it. If you show how you did it, well, somebody can train an LLM to go do it.” So the model is only worth what Nubeva can prove it does, through a signed contract, a named partner, or test results.
@convequity

Convequity on X

We think $MNDY needs to make its platform verifiable to lead work management. MNDY has not disclosed its AI ARR in dollars. Our recent SaaS Survival Scorecard report estimates it at about $20 to $30 million as of the end of Q2 2026. Leading AI-native startups in other fields are far larger. In coding, Cognition reported crossing $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate on 25 September 2026, company-wide across Devin and Windsurf. In legal work, Harvey reported on 1 October 2026 that it crossed $400 million in ARR during Q3 2026. We think MNDY has long been highly adaptive, with great leadership and a strong recent cadence of features and products. But revenue growth has slowed, and in our view it has gained little from AI so far, because work management is a hard area for AI. In our view, coding agents suddenly became highly effective around early 2026, and work management has not yet had its own coding moment. Verifiability is the key difference: code can be tested, while most work management outcomes are hard to check. Rather than wait for that moment, how can MNDY make work management more verifiable? It could track and measure the actions taken on its platform and their outcomes, so that everything that happens there is verifiable. MNDY can learn from Palantir. Palantir launched AIP in 2023, its AI platform built on its ontology, and we think that ontology helped Palantir succeed with models much weaker than today's. Could MNDY build a similar substrate or ontology for work management in order to make the work done on its platform more verifiable? We do not claim to have the answer. Our view is that to thrive, and not only survive, MNDY needs to lead work management by making its platform verifiable, however it chooses to do that.

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OSS Q3 FY12/26 Earnings Analysis

One Stop Systems grew Q3 continuing-operations revenue 36% to $12.6 million, raised FY2026 revenue guidance to $45 million, and used $11.8…

OSS $129M
Cestrian Capital Research 1 click
PSN · long

Parsons CORP

Parsons generates roughly half of its $6.4 billion revenue from Federal Solutions, serving defense and intelligence customers.

PSN $5.6B
Value Investors Club

The Data Center Bridge

Small- and mid-cap data center stocks trade as one despite sharply different funding bridges: 12 of 15 cover fixed costs on signed…

IREN $9.9BFRMI $1.9B
CV's Substack 16 clicks

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