Key Takeaways
- CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz says “Black October,” the rush to patch software flaws that AI models found this month, is only the beginning, and the threat will get worse.
- Kurtz thinks protecting AI agents could become a bigger business than CrowdStrike’s core endpoint protection. The company now targets $10 billion of ARR by fiscal 2030, roughly double its ARR at the end of January.
- Net new ARR rose 51% to a record $332.8 million in the quarter to July 31, 2026, but analysts have barely raised their revenue estimates since.
- At about 190x forward earnings, the stock already prices in much of that demand. The next tests are the October-quarter report in early December and the first fiscal 2028 guidance in early March.
CrowdStrike (CRWD) CEO George Kurtz has some bad news for anyone hoping October’s cybersecurity scramble is winding down:
“if you think what we saw last week and this Black October is the end, it’s only the beginning. Actually only going to get worse from here.”
That’s from Monday’s episode of The Compound and Friends.
“Black October” is the name for the rush to patch after researchers using AI models found critical flaws in PHP, a programming language that runs much of the web. Former CISA Director Chris Krebs told CNBC on Oct. 23 that 3% of all the critical vulnerabilities ever discovered had been found in the past month.
Kurtz noted that the PHP flaw had been known for about six years. It went unfixed because nobody thought it could be exploited, until AI proved otherwise. Plenty of other known flaws sit in the same low-priority pile.
Which is scary for just about everyone except the companies selling the defense.
TIKR tracks 54 analysts on CrowdStrike. How many say “Buy”?
See the full breakdown of Buy, Hold, and Sell ratings on CrowdStrike, along with Wall Street’s revenue and earnings estimates, all in one place. More than 500,000 investors use TIKR to research stocks like this one. See CrowdStrike’s Analyst Ratings
The demand is already showing up
CrowdStrike’s numbers say customers are already acting on it. In the quarter to July 31, 2026, revenue rose 26% to $1.47 billion and net new annual recurring revenue (ARR) jumped 51% to a record $332.8 million. Management has raised its full-year net new ARR growth guidance twice since March, from 20% to 25% at first and now to 34% at the midpoint. Free cash flow was 30% of revenue in the six months to July 31, up from 25% a year earlier.
That’s why CrowdStrike pulled its long-term targets forward a year in September. It now aims for $10 billion of ARR by fiscal 2030 and $20 billion by fiscal 2035. The first is roughly double the $5.25 billion it had at the end of January. Kurtz says selling more to existing customers gets it there, and he called it “kind of simple math.”
Wall Street’s revenue estimates already follow that path.
Consensus has revenue growing from $4.81 billion in the year ended January 2026 to $9.02 billion in fiscal 2029. The four analysts who look a year further out have $10.7 billion for fiscal 2030.
But those estimates have barely budged through the surge: analysts raised their fiscal 2028 revenue estimate just 1.9% over the past 90 days. If Kurtz is right that this only gets worse, they have room to go up.
Agents could outgrow the core
Plus: Kurtz sees a new market forming on top of the one CrowdStrike already leads. Its Falcon Guardian product, launched in late August, tracks AI agents from the moment they start up. He thinks protecting those agents could outgrow the endpoint detection and response (EDR) business CrowdStrike was built on:
“it could be bigger than EDR because there’s going to be so many more AI agents that are out there that are going to need to be protected.”
His reason is that companies spent decades refusing to run untrusted code. Then they gave AI agents broad privileges and let them download anything from the internet unchecked. “We just undid 30 years of security control.”
The early numbers back him up. ARR from AI detection and response, the product line that includes Falcon Guardian, nearly tripled from the April quarter to the July quarter. The risk is that the AI labs and cloud providers build their own defenses. OpenAI already sells Codex Security, and Amazon’s AWS made its own autonomous defense tool, Continuum, generally available on Oct. 23.
At 190x, a lot of good news is priced in
The stock has more than doubled this year, and the valuation has stretched with it. CrowdStrike trades at about 190x forward earnings, near the top of its three-year range and far above its 104x average.
So the stock needs those estimates to rise. The first test is the October-quarter report in early December, where management has guided to $343 million to $347 million of net new ARR. The bigger test is the January quarter. The full-year guidance implies about $421 million of net new ARR there, 27% above last year’s record.
My take: Kurtz is probably right that Black October is only the beginning, and customers are already paying to get ahead of it. But at 190x forward earnings, the stock is priced for estimate increases that analysts haven’t made yet. I’d wait for the first fiscal 2028 guidance in early March before buying.
Of course, if that guidance comes in strong and the Street starts raising its numbers, today’s price could look a lot more reasonable in hindsight.
So what is CrowdStrike stock actually worth?
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR’s valuation model and see what CrowdStrike could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It’s free to use.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
