Cellebrite DI Ltd. (CLBT): what the price requires
At today's price, Cellebrite DI Ltd. (CLBT) is priced for today's economics sustained for ~10.3 years. boothcheck doesn't publish a fair value or a price target; it shows what the price assumes, so you can judge whether that bar is too high.
Generated: 2026-07-14 · Exported: 2026-07-16 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/CLBT
Headline
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Ticker | CLBT |
| Company | Cellebrite DI Ltd. |
| Current price | $16.07/sh |
| Composition | Subscription services 70% / Term-license 20% / Other non-recurring 4% / Professional services 6% |
What The Price Requires (Inversion)
The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Inversion basis | whole-company |
| Operating margin needed | 9.9% |
| Operating margin today | 14.0% |
| Margin compression implied | -4.1pp |
| Must persist for | 10.3y |
| Multiple paid | 56x operating income |
The operating-margin requirement is derived from the framework's value band at year 6, a separately labeled basis from the headline growth/duration solve.
Solve inputs: computed at a 9.1% cost of capital; growth searched up to the 25% self-funding ceiling; each 1pp moves the implied horizon ~2.2 years.
How unusual the bet is: high
| Reference | Value |
|---|---|
| vs own history | -0.50σ |
| cohort percentile (of 177 peers) | 85 |
| sustained it ~10 years at this level | 15% |
| implied end-window share | 0% |
Valuation X-Ray
Asset, earnings-power and peer-multiple models all land far below the price; ONLY the growth-DCF reaches it. The bet is durable compounding the static frames structurally cannot price (a moat/durability premium).
How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.
| Family | Median price/FV | Models | Reads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Asset | 4.37x | 5 | expensive |
| Earnings | 3.99x | 4 | expensive |
| Relative | 1.38x | 3 | expensive |
| Growth | 0.78x | 3 | justifies |
Families that justify the price: Growth Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings
The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 9.1%); the inversion above states its own rate.
Per-Model Detail (n=15)
| Model | Family | FV | Price/FV | Applicable | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DCF Perpetual Growth | Growth | $21.02 | 0.76x | yes | FCF base $0.2B, growth 18% (input: historical growth), terminal g 4.0%, WACC 9.1%, 6yr projection |
| DCF Exit Multiple | Growth | $20.50 | 0.78x | yes | Exit EV/EBITDA: 49.0x / 51.0x / 53.0x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull), 6yr |
| Relative Valuation | Relative | $11.65 | 1.38x | yes | P/E 35x (static sector reference · 2026-04), scenarios: 28.7x / 35.0x / 41.3x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 32.81x |
| Simple DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Two-Stage DDM | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Simple Excess Return | Asset | $3.39 | 4.74x | yes | BV/sh $1.94, ROE (TTM) 16.2%, ke 9.3% |
| Two-Stage Excess Return | Asset | $4.42 | 3.64x | yes | 5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3% |
| Discounted Future Market Cap | Growth | $17.15 | 0.94x | yes | Rev $0.5B, growth 18% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 6.9x / 8.4x / 10.0x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 12x) |
| Growth-Adjusted P/E | Relative | — | — | no | — |
| Margin Trajectory | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Earnings Power Value | Earnings | $1.37 | 11.73x | yes | Normalized EBIT (5y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $0.03B × (1−14%) / WACC 9.1% → EPV (no growth) |
| Residual Income | Asset | $4.49 | 3.58x | yes | BV $1.94 + 5yr PV of (ROE (TTM) 16.2% − Kₑ 9.3%) × BV; BV grows 8.8%/yr |
| Graham Number | Asset | $3.68 | 4.37x | yes | √(22.5 × EPS $0.31 × BVPS $1.94) — Graham's conservative floor |
| EV/EBITDA Relative | Relative | $7.91 | 2.03x | yes | EBITDA $0.08B × sector EV/EBITDA 25.0x |
| FCF Yield | Earnings | $7.00 | 2.30x | yes | FCF $160.3M / Kₑ 9.3% — zero-growth perpetuity |
| SBC-Adj FCF Yield | Earnings | $5.06 | 3.18x | yes | SBC-adj FCF $0.12B (FCF $0.16B − SBC $0.04B) capitalized at Kₑ |
| Ben Graham Formula | Earnings | $0.26 | 61.81x | yes | EPS $0.31 × (8.5 + 2×-5.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%) (excluded from median) |
| ROIC-Justified P/B | Asset | $2.61 | 6.16x | yes | BV $1.94 × (ROIC 12.3% / WACC 9.1%) |
| P/Sales Sector | Relative | $15.23 | 1.06x | yes | Revenue $0.48B × sector P/S 8.0x |
| PEG Fair Value | Relative | — | — | no | — |
| Earnings Yield | Earnings | $3.35 | 4.80x | yes | EPS $0.31 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%) |
| Funds From Operations Multiple | Relative | — | — | no | — |
| Clinical Phase NPV | Growth | — | — | no | — |
| Merton | Asset | — | — | no | — |
| V5 Mechanical | — | — | — | no | — |
Solvency
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Net cash | $276.0m |
| Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax) | -4.81x (net cash) |
| Net debt / operating income (pre-tax) | -4.15x (net cash) |
| Share count CAGR (dilution) | 11.5% |
| Burning cash | no |
Interest expense is not separately reported in the latest filings, so interest coverage cannot be computed.
Bullet Takeaways
- Cellebrite sells digital-intelligence and forensics software to more than 7,000 law enforcement, defense, and intelligence agencies, a subscription business where annual recurring revenue grew 21% to $493 million and subscription revenue rose 23% in the first quarter.
- The business converts that growth to cash unusually well, a trailing free-cash-flow margin around 32%, but the share count is growing roughly 11.5% a year from stock-based compensation, so per-share value is leaking even as the company compounds.
- The price is a long-duration bet: it sits at a high multiple of current earnings and is reached only by the growth-based methods, which means it requires Cellebrite to sustain high-teens recurring-revenue growth for the better part of a decade, with government budgets and the AI product cycle the variables that decide it.
Bull Case
Start with the bear's strongest objection, because the bull case only holds if it survives it: the stock is expensive, trading at a high multiple of current earnings that only the growth-based valuation methods can reach. Fair enough. Now look at what is actually growing. Annual recurring revenue rose 21% to $493 million in the first quarter, subscription revenue grew 23% to $117.9 million, and the company guided second-quarter ARR to $510 million to $513 million. This is not a hope-and-prayer growth story attached to a thin business; it is a subscription franchise compounding in the high teens to low twenties with a trailing free-cash-flow margin around 32%. The expensive multiple is the market paying for durable recurring growth, and the recurring growth is real and accelerating, not a forecast waiting to disappoint.
What makes the growth durable is the customer and the switching cost. Cellebrite's software is the standard tool for extracting and analyzing evidence from digital devices, and it is embedded in the workflows of more than 7,000 law enforcement, defense, and intelligence agencies worldwide. Police forces and government agencies do not casually swap out the forensic platform that their investigations, chain-of-custody, and court admissibility depend on. That is the same land-and-expand dynamic that defines the best subscription software businesses, where existing customers spend more over time; Nutanix quantifies the effect in its filings, with long-tenured large customers placing lifetime orders many times their initial order size [NTNX FY2025 10-K, accession 0001193125-25-213801]. Cellebrite's government installed base is even stickier than a typical enterprise account, because the cost of switching is not just retraining but the integrity of active casework.
The product cycle is widening the moat at the right moment. Cellebrite has launched Genesis, a next-generation AI investigation tool that drew more than 500 early adopters across 15 countries, achieved FedRAMP High authorization that opens its cloud offerings to US federal agencies, and added drone-forensics and advanced-unlock capabilities. The December 2025 acquisition of Corellium, a leader in Arm-based virtualization, deepens the technical foundation under all of it. FedRAMP High in particular is a gate, not a feature: it is a multi-year certification that competitors cannot quickly replicate and that unlocks the highest-security US government cloud workloads. A business with a sticky government base, accelerating recurring revenue, 32% cash margins, and a freshly certified AI platform is exactly the kind of compounder the static valuation methods are structurally unable to price.
Bear Case
The price is a bet on a specific story holding for a very long time, and the most fragile assumption inside it is duration. To justify today's price, Cellebrite has to keep compounding at something like its current pace for roughly the better part of a decade, because only the growth-based methods reach the price and they get there by extending high-teens growth far into the future. That is a long runway to ask of any software company, and it is a particularly demanding ask for one whose customers are government agencies. Public-sector budgets are not subscription-software customers in the ordinary sense; they are appropriations, subject to political cycles, fiscal tightening, and procurement freezes. The recurring revenue is sticky once won, but the growth on top of it depends on agencies funding new licenses and modules, and that funding is exactly the kind of spending that gets deferred when budgets tighten. A single bad budget cycle in a few large jurisdictions would not break the business, but it would break the growth rate the price requires.
The second fragile assumption is margin. The bull leans on a 32% free-cash-flow margin, but the company's GAAP operating margin is only 10.7%, and the gap is largely stock-based compensation. That compensation is real economic cost, and it shows up in the share count, which is growing about 11.5% a year. Dilution at that pace is a powerful headwind: even if the company compounds total value at a healthy rate, a holder's per-share claim grows far more slowly because the pie is being cut into more pieces each year. Recent results showed gross, operating, and net margins declining even as revenue grew, which is the opposite of the operating leverage a maturing software company is supposed to demonstrate at scale. If margins keep slipping while the company funds growth with stock, the cash-flow story the bull tells is quietly being transferred from shareholders to employees.
There is also concentration and reputational risk that a pure growth model ignores. Cellebrite's tools unlock and extract data from personal devices, which ties the company's commercial fortunes to the politics of surveillance and law enforcement access. That exposure cuts both ways: it can invite regulatory restriction on which governments and agencies the company may sell to, and it makes the customer base sensitive to public and political scrutiny in a way ordinary enterprise software is not. The valuation methods grounded in current earnings, asset value, and a no-growth capitalization of profit all land far below the price, several of them at a small fraction of it, because they value what Cellebrite has demonstrated rather than what it must sustain. The bear case is not that the company is bad; it is that the price has already paid for nearly a decade of uninterrupted high-teens growth from a government-funded customer base, and the conservative methods are pricing the chance that something, a budget cycle, a margin slip, a regulatory limit, interrupts it.
Valuation
The cleanest way to read Cellebrite's price is as a duration bet. At $14.97 it trades at roughly 52 times blended earnings, and to stand up the price requires the company's competitive advantage and growth to persist for about nine and a half years, on margins well above the 10.7% operating margin it earns today. That is the bet in one line: not that Cellebrite grows fast next year, which it plainly is, but that it keeps doing so for the better part of a decade.
The families of methods divide sharply, and the division is the whole point. Only the growth-based methods reach the price, and they do so by crediting the company's high-teens recurring-revenue growth forward; the price-to-sales lens, at the software sector's typical multiple, lands almost exactly at the price. Every method anchored to current earnings or assets lands far below it. The earnings-power lens, which capitalizes normalized operating profit with no growth, sits at a small fraction of the price because Cellebrite's GAAP profit is modest relative to its valuation. The asset-based methods land lowest of all, on a book value under $2 per share, which is mechanically uninformative for a capital-light software business and should be set aside. So the honest read is that this is a pure growth-and-durability premium: the static frames cannot price compounding, and the entire valuation rests on the forward-growth methods being right about how long the growth lasts.
The peer set frames what the price is paying for. The relevant comparison is the high-growth subscription-software cohort, names like Nutanix, Klaviyo, and Semrush, valued on recurring revenue and net retention rather than trailing earnings, where the durability of the land-and-expand motion is the core asset; Nutanix's own filings show that motion producing lifetime customer orders many times the initial purchase [NTNX FY2025 10-K, accession 0001193125-25-213801]. Cellebrite's case for its premium is that its government installed base is even stickier and its ARR is still accelerating, ARR of $493 million growing 21%, with second-quarter guidance to $510 million to $513 million. The balance sheet supports the bet, net cash of $124 million removes solvency from the question. What remains is the cleanest version of the underwriting decision the price poses: a buyer is paying a full software multiple for high-teens recurring growth, funded against roughly 11.5% annual share dilution, and is betting that government-budget-driven demand sustains that growth long enough to earn a multiple only the growth methods can presently justify.
Catalysts
The product roadmap is the catalyst with the most leverage on the growth rate the price depends on. Cellebrite launched Genesis, a next-generation AI investigation solution, which drew more than 500 early adopters across 15 countries, and it secured FedRAMP High authorization, a certification that opens its cloud offerings to high-security US federal agencies. It has also expanded into drone forensics, advanced unlock tools, and the Guardian Investigate offering, and deepened its technical base with the December 2025 acquisition of Corellium, a leader in Arm-based virtualization. The conversion of Genesis early adopters into paid ARR and the early traction of the new FedRAMP-eligible federal cloud business are the specific milestones that would either validate or undercut the high-teens growth the valuation assumes.
The first-quarter results and guidance set the bar for the year. Revenue rose 19% to $128.3 million, subscription revenue grew 23% to $117.9 million, and annual recurring revenue climbed 21% to $493 million, with the company guiding second-quarter ARR to $510 million to $513 million and revenue growth of 15% to 17%. Full-year guidance implies high-teens ARR and revenue growth. ARR is the number to track, because it is the leading indicator of subscription revenue and the cleanest measure of whether the government installed base keeps expanding its spend. The leadership picture is also worth watching: Thomas Hogan leads the company following a planned transition, and the board added Michael Capellas as lead independent director, so governance continuity through the AI-driven growth phase is a secondary but real factor.
Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)
Core business (reported)
- WK (WORKIVA INC)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- AVPT (AvePoint, Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- CVLT (Commvault Systems, Inc)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- APPN (APPIAN CORPORATION)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- MNDY (monday.com Ltd.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- QTWO (Q2 Holdings, Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- BSY (BENTLEY SYSTEMS, INCORPORATED)
- (no filing in the citation store)
- APPF (AppFolio, Inc.)
- (no filing in the citation store)
Methodology Note
- Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
- Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
- Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
- Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.
Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.
Sources
Cellebrite Q1 2026 results · Cellebrite 2026 guidance · Cellebrite Q1 2026 disclosures · Cellebrite corporate disclosures, 2025-2026 · Cellebrite corporate disclosures, 2024-2026