Key Highlights

● Palo Alto Networks reported fiscal fourth-quarter Revenue of $3.41 billion, up 34% year over year, with Next-Generation Security annual Recurring Revenue hitting $9.10 billion, up 63%, and guided FY2027 revenue to roughly $14.20 billion.

● Xometry posted record second-quarter revenue of $229.3 million, up 41% year over year, with active buyers up 20% to 89,557 and a narrowed net loss of $5.3 million as adjusted EBITDA rose to $14.1 million.

● PDF Solutions grew second-quarter revenue 19% to $61.5 million with gross Margin near 70% and Backlog of $270.7 million, reaffirming roughly 20% annual revenue growth for 2026.

● Duos Technologies reported $53.64 million in pretax income that was driven almost entirely by a $53.17 million one-time Investment sale, with core Operating Income of just $0.05 million, while pivoting toward edge-AI data centers with 25 megawatts of contracted capacity for 2026.

Five very different Nasdaq names, a Cybersecurity giant, a Manufacturing marketplace, a small-cap edge-AI pivot, a semiconductor-analytics specialist and a crypto asset manager, offer a wide-angle read on how AI, software and technology services are actually monetizing in autumn 2026.

Five Tickers, One Question About How AI Pays Its Way

Halfway through September 2026, the debate around AI has shifted from whether the technology matters to who is actually being paid for it. That distinction is where the five tickers below earn their place. Palo Alto Networks, Xometry, Duos Technologies, PDF Solutions and CoinShares sit in different corners of the Nasdaq Composite, and they do not form a tidy peer group.

But read together they trace the arc from platform-scale software down to niche services and adjacent digital-asset plumbing: Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW), Xometry (NASDAQ: XMTR), Duos Technologies (NASDAQ: DUOT), PDF Solutions (NASDAQ: PDFS) and CoinShares (NASDAQ: CSHR). Below is a fact-checked look at what each has reported, followed by analysis and clearly flagged forecasts.

The Backdrop: Software Consolidation, Real Revenue and a Watchful Fed

Two forces frame this group. The first is monetization. After two years in which "AI" was mostly a slide in an investor deck, several of these companies are now reporting specific, audited numbers tied to AI-adjacent demand, recurring security revenue, marketplace volume, chip-analytics contracts and edge compute capacity. That is a meaningful change in the quality of the story.

The second force is the macro setting. The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to meet in mid-September 2026, and rate expectations remain a central swing Factor for software and small-cap valuations, since both lean heavily on the value of future cash flows. Higher-for-longer policy compresses the multiples investors are willing to pay for growth; any dovish shift tends to do the opposite. Written on the eve of that decision, the macro comments here are deliberately hedged, with the numbers drawn from primary Earnings releases.

Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ:PANW): Platform Consolidation Meets Agentic AI

Palo Alto Networks reported fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year 2026 results on September 1, 2026. Q4 revenue reached $3.41 billion, up 34% year over year, and full-year FY2026 revenue was $11.48 billion. Next-Generation Security annual recurring revenue hit $9.10 billion, up 63%, with remaining performance obligations of $21.2 billion. The quarter carried a GAAP net loss of $282 million but non-GAAP Net Income of $853 million, or $1.02 per diluted share. Management guided FY2027 revenue to roughly 14.20 billion and NGS ARR to about 11.175 billion.

Alongside earnings, Palo Alto has completed its Acquisition of CyberArk and announced the purchase of Console, an agentic-AI platform being folded into its Cortex line.

PANW is the clearest expression of the "platformization" thesis, the idea that enterprises will consolidate a sprawl of security tools onto one vendor. The 63% NGS ARR growth suggests that motion is working, and the CyberArk and Console deals push the company toward identity security and autonomous, agent-driven operations. The risk is expectations: at this scale, the market may already price in flawless execution, so integration missteps or any slowdown in ARR growth could weigh on the stock. Watch NGS ARR trajectory into FY2027.

Xometry (NASDAQ:XMTR): An AI-Driven Marketplace Turning Growth Into Leverage

Xometry reported record second-quarter 2026 results on August 4, 2026. Total revenue was $229.3 million, up 41% year over year, with marketplace revenue of $215.4 million, up 45%. Gross margin was 38.1%, active buyers reached 89,557, up 20%, and the net loss narrowed to $5.3 million while adjusted EBITDA rose to $14.1 million. The company raised full-year 2026 revenue-growth guidance to 33-34% and guided Q3 revenue to 236 million.

Xometry also detailed AI tooling: an upgraded context-aware AI process recommender, a new generation of cost-prediction models and adaptive sourcing models that use proprietary supplier data for dynamic pricing.

Xometry runs an on-demand manufacturing marketplace, matching buyers who upload part designs with a global network of suppliers. AI sits at the core of that matching, since pricing, process selection and sourcing all lean on models trained on the company's own transaction data. The accelerating revenue growth alongside a shrinking loss is the combination marketplace investors want: scale that finally produces operating leverage. The open question is durability, since marketplace Economics can be cyclical and tied to manufacturing demand.

Duos Technologies (NASDAQ:DUOT): A Rail-Inspection Legacy Reborn as Edge AI

Duos Technologies reported second-quarter 2026 results on August 17, 2026. Revenue was $6.18 million, up 30% year over year, with gross margin of 55.9%. The company reported net income before taxes of $53.64 million, but that figure was driven overwhelmingly by a $53.17 million gain on the sale of a minority-held investment, not operations; operating income was a slim $0.05 million. Duos ended June with $112.3 million in cash. It reaffirmed a 2026 revenue target of over $50 million and disclosed that it completed the divestiture of its legacy rail-technology subsidiary.

On the growth side, Duos cited 25 MW of contracted edge data-center capacity for 2026, a five-year, 55 MW hosting agreement with Axe Compute and a separate 10 MW contract.

Duos has pivoted decisively toward edge AI data centers and GPU-as-a-service, divesting the rail-inspection roots that once defined it. The headline net income is misleading without context; strip the one-time investment gain and this remains an early-stage, thinly profitable business. Execution risk is high, since hitting the $50 million-plus target depends on deploying contracted megawatts on schedule. The strong cash balance buys runway, but delivery is unproven at scale.

PDF Solutions (NASDAQ:PDFS): Quiet Compounding in Semiconductor Analytics

PDF Solutions reported second-quarter 2026 results on August 6, 2026. Total revenue was $61.5 million, up 19% year over year from $51.7 million. GAAP net income was $0.10 per diluted share and non-GAAP net income was $0.27 per diluted share. GAAP gross margin was 69% and non-GAAP gross margin 73%, with ending backlog of $270.7 million. Management reaffirmed a roughly 20% annual revenue-growth target for 2026 and cited wins across its secureWISE, DirectScan and Exensio products.

PDF Solutions is the least flashy name here and, arguably, the most structurally interesting. It sells analytics software and yield-management tools to semiconductor manufacturers, the data layer beneath the chips that power the rest of this group. High gross margins, a growing backlog and steady double-digit growth describe a recurring-revenue software Business riding the semiconductor build-out. Its Exensio platform aggregates manufacturing data, precisely the kind of asset that becomes more valuable as chipmakers lean on Machine Learning to improve yields. Sustained fab investment supports the thesis; a downturn in Capital spending would pressure it.

CoinShares (NASDAQ:CSHR): The Odd One Out, A Crypto Manager, Not a Software Play

CoinShares is not an AI, software or technology-services company. It is a global asset manager specializing in digital assets, which began trading on Nasdaq on April 1, 2026, following a SPAC combination. The company scheduled its first-half 2026 financial results for release on September 14, 2026, before market open, with a management Q&A the same day. Its market Capitalization was cited at roughly $733 million around September 8-9, 2026.

CoinShares is included here because it appears on the same watchlist, but readers deserve honesty about the fit: this is a crypto-adjacent financial-services business, and its fortunes track digital-asset prices, fund flows and regulatory currents far more than any enterprise-software cycle. There is a genuine technology angle, since running digital-asset products demands serious infrastructure, but categorizing CoinShares alongside a cybersecurity platform or a chip-analytics vendor overstates the overlap.

With H1 results landing on the publication date, the near-term driver is clear: Assets under management, net flows and profitability disclosed in that report. Given crypto's volatility, CSHR is best assessed on its own terms, not as a proxy for the software sector.

What Investors Should Watch

Across the group, a handful of concrete catalysts stand out. For Palo Alto, the pace of NGS ARR growth and how cleanly CyberArk and Console integrate into Cortex. For Xometry, whether revenue can stay above 30% growth while adjusted EBITDA keeps climbing. For Duos, actual megawatt deployment against the reaffirmed $50 million-plus target, along with the reminder that recent net income was inflated by a one-off gain. For PDF Solutions, the 20% growth target and backlog conversion. For CoinShares, the September 14 H1 report and the AUM and net-flow figures inside it.

Cutting across all five is the mid-September Federal Reserve decision. Rate expectations move software and small-cap valuations more than most single earnings prints, so the macro tone into late September matters for every name here.

How Five Names Are Actually Getting Paid for AI

These five tickers are not a basket to buy or sell as one; their business models barely rhyme. What they share is a role as evidence. Palo Alto shows AI-era security consolidating at scale. Xometry shows AI turning a marketplace toward profitability. Duos shows a small-cap reinventing itself around edge compute, with the accounting caveats that come with early-stage change. PDF Solutions shows the quiet, high-margin software beneath the semiconductor boom, and CoinShares shows why labels matter, because it does not belong in the software bucket at all.

Read honestly, together they map how AI, software and technology services are being monetized across the Nasdaq Composite in September 2026, unevenly, but increasingly with real numbers attached.