CoStar Group Valuation Multiples

Alphabet is a holding company that wholly owns internet giant Google. The California-based company derives slightly less than 90% of its revenue from Google services, the vast majority of which is advertising sales. Alongside online ads, Google services houses sales stemming from Google’s subscription services (YouTube TV and YouTube Music, among others), platforms (sales and in-app purchases on Play Store), and devices (Chromebooks, Pixel smartphones, and smart home products such as Chromecast). Google’s cloud computing platform accounts for roughly 10% of Alphabet’s revenue. The firm’s investments in up-and-coming technologies such as self-driving cars (Waymo), health (Verily), and internet access (Google Fiber) make up the rest.

Microsoft develops and licenses consumer and enterprise software. It is known for its Windows operating systems and Office productivity suite. The company is organized into three equally sized broad segments: productivity and business processes (legacy Microsoft Office, cloud-based Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype, LinkedIn, Dynamics), intelligence cloud (infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service offerings Azure, Windows Server OS, SQL Server), and more personal computing (Windows Client, Xbox, Bing search, display advertising, and Surface laptops, tablets, and desktops).

Amazon is the leading online retailer and marketplace for third party sellers. Retail related revenue represents approximately 74% of total, followed by Amazon Web Services (17%), and advertising services (9%). International segments constitute 22% of Amazon's total revenue, led by Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

Quhuo Ltd is a gig economy platform focusing on local life services in China. It provide tech-enabled, end-to-end operational solutions to consumer service businesses, including on-demand delivery solutions, mobility service solutions, housekeeping and accommodation solutions, and other services. Its three operating segments, include (i) on-demand delivery solutions, (ii) mobility service solutions, and (iii) housekeeping and accommodation solutions and other services.

Cisco Systems is the largest provider of networking equipment in the world and one of the largest software companies in the world. Its largest businesses are selling networking hardware and software (where it has leading market shares) and cybersecurity software such as firewalls. It also has collaboration products, like its Webex suite, and observability tools. It primarily outsources its manufacturing to third parties and has a large sales and marketing staff—25,000 strong across 90 countries. Overall, Cisco employs 80,000 people and sells its products globally.

Oracle provides enterprise applications and infrastructure offerings through a variety of flexible IT deployment models, including on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid. Founded in 1977, Oracle pioneered the first commercial SQL-based relational database management system, which is commonly used by the world’s largest companies for high-volume online transaction processing workloads. Besides databases, Oracle also sells enterprise resource planning platforms and cloud infrastructure that play an increasingly important role in large language model training and inferencing.

Palantir is an artificial intelligence, analytics, and automated decision-making company that leverages data to drive efficiency across its clients' organizations. The firm serves commercial and government clients via its Foundry and Gotham platforms, respectively. Palantir works only with entities in Western-allied nations and reserves the right not to work with anyone that is antithetical to Western values. The company was founded in 2003 and went public in 2020.

Palo Alto Networks is a platform-based cybersecurity vendor with product offerings covering network security, cloud security, and security operations. The California-based firm has more than 80,000 enterprise customers across the world, including more than three fourths of the Global 2000.

Alibaba is the world's largest online and mobile commerce company as measured by gross merchandise volume. It operates China's online marketplaces, including Taobao (consumer-to-consumer) and Tmall (business-to-consumer). The China retail e-commerce platform is the most valuable cash flow-generating business at Alibaba. Additional revenue sources include China wholesale e-commerce, international retail and wholesale e-commerce, local consumer services, travel services, cloud computing, digital media and entertainment, Cainiao logistics services, and other businesses.

Dell Technologies is a broad information technology vendor, primarily supplying hardware to enterprises. It focuses on premium and commercial personal computers, as well as enterprise on-premises data center hardware. It holds top-three market shares in its core markets of personal computers, peripheral displays, mainstream servers, and external storage. Dell has a robust ecosystem of component and assembly partners, and also relies heavily on channel partners to fulfill its sales.

CrowdStrike is a cloud-based cybersecurity company specializing in next-generation security verticals such as endpoint, cloud workload, identity, and security operations. CrowdStrike’s primary offering is its Falcon platform that offers a proverbial single pane of glass for an enterprise to detect and respond to security threats attacking its IT infrastructure. The Texas-based firm was founded in 2011 and went public in 2019.

Incorporated in 1911, International Business Machines, or IBM, is one of the oldest technology companies in the world. It provides software, IT consulting services, and hardware to help business customers modernize their technology workflows. IBM operates in 175 countries and employs approximately 300,000 people. The company has a robust roster of business partners to service its clients, which includes 95% of all Fortune 500 companies. IBM’s products, including Red Hat, watsonx, and mainframes, handle some of the world’s most important data workloads in areas like finance and retail.

Founded in Germany in 1972 by former IBM employees, SAP is the world’s largest provider of enterprise application software. Known as the leader in enterprise resource planning software, SAP’s portfolio also includes software for supply chain management, procurement, travel and expense management, and customer relationship management, among others. The company operates in more than 180 countries and has more than 400,000 customers, approximately 80% of which are small to medium-size enterprises.

Shopify offers an e-commerce platform primarily to small and medium-size businesses. The firm has two segments. The subscription solutions segment allows Shopify merchants to conduct e-commerce on a variety of platforms, including the company’s website, physical stores, pop-up stores, kiosks, social networks (Facebook), and Amazon. The merchant solutions segment offers add-on products for the platform that facilitate e-commerce and include Shopify Payments, Shopify Shipping, and Shopify Capital.

Uber Technologies is a technology provider that matches riders with drivers, hungry people with restaurants and food couriers, and shippers with carriers. The firm's on-demand technology platform is currently utilized by traditional cars as well as autonomous vehicles, but could eventually be used for additional products and services, such as delivery via drones or electronic vehicle take-off and landing (eVTOL) technology. Uber operates in over 70 countries, with over 202 million users who order rides or food at least once a month.

AppLovin is a vertically integrated advertising technology company that acts as a demand-side platform for advertisers, a supply-side platform for publishers, and an exchange facilitating transactions between the two. About 80% of AppLovin’s revenue comes from the DSP, AppDiscovery, while the remainder comes from the SSP, Max. AppLovin’s primary tool for future growth is AXON 2, which is an ad optimizer operating within the DSP that allows advertisers to place ads according to specified return thresholds.

Booking is the world's largest online travel agency by sales, offering booking and payment services for hotel and alternative accommodation rooms, airlines, rental cars, restaurants, cruises, experiences, and other vacation packages. The company operates several branded travel booking sites, including Booking.com, Agoda, OpenTable, Rentalcars.com, Kayak, and Momondo. Transaction fees for online bookings account for the bulk of revenue and profits.

Salesforce provides enterprise cloud computing solutions. The company offers customer relationship management technology that brings companies and customers together. Its Customer 360 platform helps the group deliver a single source of truth, connecting customer data across systems, apps, and devices to help companies sell, service, market, and conduct commerce. It also offers Service Cloud for customer support, Marketing Cloud for digital marketing campaigns, Commerce Cloud as an e-commerce engine, the Salesforce Platform, which allows enterprises to build applications, and other solutions, such as MuleSoft for data integration.

S&P Global provides data and benchmarks to capital and commodity market participants. Its ratings business is the largest credit rating agency in the world and S&P's largest segment by profitability. S&P's largest segment by revenue is market intelligence, which provides desktop, data and advisory solutions, enterprise solutions, and credit/risk solutions mostly in the financial-services industry. S&P's other segments include energy (formerly commodity insights, this segment includes Platts and other data), mobility (Carfax), and indexes. S&P plans to spin off mobility in 2026.

PDD Holdings operates commerce businesses in over 80 countries globally. Its main operations are Pinduoduo, a social commerce platform in China, and Temu, a global e-commerce marketplace. PDD also has a community group purchase business in China. PDD has built a network of sourcing, logistics, and fulfillment capabilities that support its underlying businesses.

Fortinet is a platform-based cybersecurity vendor with product offerings covering network security, cloud security, zero-trust access, and security operations. The firm derives a majority of its revenue through sales of its subscriptions and support-based business. The California-based firm has more than 800,000 customers across the world.

Recruit is a holding company for various technology and employment-related businesses. Recruit’s primary business is its HR technology segment, in which it owns two out of three globally scaled employment-related platforms: www.indeed.com, an online marketplace for employment; and www.glassdoor.com, an online review site for employers. Recruit also owns various marketing businesses operating in Japan for life events and lifestyle, a software solutions business for small and medium-size enterprises, or SMEs, in Japan, and various staffing businesses operating throughout the developed world.

ServiceNow Inc provides software solutions to structure and automate various business processes via a SaaS delivery model. The company primarily focuses on the IT function for enterprise customers. ServiceNow began with IT service management, expanded within the IT function, and more recently directed its workflow automation logic to functional areas beyond IT, notably customer service, HR service delivery, and security operations. ServiceNow also offers an application development platform as a service.

Cloudflare is a software company based in San Francisco, California, that offers security and web performance offerings by utilizing a distributed, serverless content delivery network, or CDN. The firm’s edge computing platform, Workers, leverages this network by providing clients the ability to deploy and execute code without maintaining servers.

Adobe provides content creation, document management, and digital marketing and advertising software and services to creative professionals and marketers for creating, managing, delivering, measuring, optimizing, and engaging with compelling content multiple operating systems, devices, and media. The company operates with three segments: digital media content creation, digital experience for marketing solutions, and publishing for legacy products (less than 5% of revenue).

Prosus is a consumer internet group with listed and unlisted platforms across 100 countries. Around 80% of Prosus’ net asset value is derived from its Tencent holdings, the world’s largest game publisher and operator of WeChat, China’s super app with 1.3 billion users. Prosus has approximately a 23% stake in Tencent. The rest of the group’s businesses and investments are organized into classifieds, food delivery, payments and fintech, and edtech. This includes ownership of iFood, Brazil’s largest food delivery app, and a 25% stake in Swiggy, the second-largest delivery platform in India.In 2019, Prosus was spun out of South Africa-based parent company Naspers Ltd and listed on the Euronext exchange. Naspers holds approximately 75% of Prosus’ shares.

MercadoLibre runs the largest e-commerce marketplace in Latin America, with about 150 million active users and more than 600 million active listings across 18 countries stitching into its commerce network or fintech solutions when last reported. The company operates a host of complementary businesses to its core online shop, with shipping solutions (Mercado Envios), a payment and financing operation (Mercado Pago and Mercado Credito), advertisements (Mercado Clics), classifieds, and a turnkey e-commerce solution (Mercado Shops) rounding out its arsenal. MercadoLibre generates revenue from final value fees, advertising royalties, payment processing, insertion fees, subscription fees, and interest income from consumer and small-business lending.

Founded in 2012, Snowflake is a fully managed platform that consolidates data hosted on different public clouds for centralized analytics and governance. Snowflake’s cloud-native architecture allows users to independently scale the compute and storage layers, providing customers with optimized performance at lower costs. The company’s data lake and data warehouse products support a variety of use cases, including business analytics, data engineering, and artificial intelligence. Snowflake is widely used by Fortune 2000 companies in financial services, media, and retail sectors.

Datadog is a cloud-native company that focuses on analyzing machine data. The firm's product portfolio, delivered via software as a service, enables clients to monitor and analyze their entire information technology infrastructure, from servers to applications and Python scripts. Datadog's platform can ingest and analyze large amounts of machine-generated data in real time, allowing clients to utilize it for a variety of applications throughout their businesses to ensure uptime and latency objectives.

Cadence Design Systems is a provider of electronic design automation software, intellectual property, and system design and analysis products. EDA software automates and aids in the chip design process, enhancing design accuracy, productivity, and complexity in a full-flow end-to-end solution. Cadence offers a portfolio of design IP, as well as system design and analysis products, which enables system-level analysis and verification solutions.

Moody’s, along with S&P Ratings, is a leading provider of credit ratings on fixed-income securities. The ratings segment, Moody’s Investors Service, includes corporates, structured finance, financial institutions, and public finance ratings. MIS represents a majority of the firm’s profit and often (depending on bond issuance levels) a majority of the firm's revenue. The other segment, Moody’s Analytics, consists of decision solutions, research and insights, and data and information.

Airbnb is the world’s largest online alternative accommodation travel agency; it also offers booking services for boutique hotels, experiences, and hotel-like services. Airbnb’s platform offers over 9 million active accommodation listings. Listings from the company’s 5 million-plus hosts are spread over almost every country in the world. In 2025, 42% of revenue was from North America, 39% from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, 10% from Latin America, and 9% from Asia-Pacific. Transaction fees for online bookings account for all its revenue.

Tata Consultancy Services is a leading global IT services provider based in Mumbai, India. Founded in 1968, it is one of the first companies to leverage a global delivery model that helps clients outsource their IT needs to offshore labor. The company boasts a wide range of offerings, including IT consulting, managed services, and business process outsourcing.

Founded in 2013 within the confines of the San Francisco application renaissance, DoorDash is an online delivery demand aggregator. Consumers can use its app to order food on demand for delivery or in-store pickup from participating merchants. Following the 2022 acquisition of Wolt, the firm also provides this service in Europe and Asia. DoorDash creates a marketplace for merchants to establish an online presence, market their offerings, and meet demand through delivery. The firm provides similar services to non-restaurant businesses, such as grocery, retail, and pet supplies. DoorDash is also rolling out emerging technologies, such as drone delivery, to continually innovate and deliver the best possible service to both supply-side and demand-side participants in its marketplace.

Intuit serves small and midsize businesses with accounting software QuickBooks and online marketing platform Mailchimp. The company also operates retail tax filing tool TurboTax, personal finance platform Credit Karma, and a suite of professional tax offerings for accountants. Founded in the mid-1980s, Intuit enjoys a dominant market share for small-to-midsize business accounting and self-serve tax filing in the US.

Synopsys is a provider of electronic design automation software and intellectual property products. EDA software automates and aids in the chip design process, enhancing design accuracy, productivity, and complexity in a full-flow end-to-end solution. Synopsys’ comprehensive portfolio is benefiting from a convergence of semiconductor companies moving up the stack of technologies toward systems-like companies, and systems companies moving down-stack toward in-house chip design. The resulting expansion in EDA customers alongside secular digitalization of various end markets benefits EDA vendors like Synopsys.

Meituan is the largest food delivery platform in China, with a 60%-70% share of the market in 2024, according to Morningstar estimates. In the third quarter of 2024, the firm generated 74% of its revenue from the core local commerce segment, which includes on-demand food delivery and retail, in-store services (such as visiting beauty and entertainment stores after purchasing deals on Meituan), and hotel and travel booking. The remaining 26% of revenue came from the new initiatives segment, such as the community group purchase business Meituan Select and the overseas food delivery business.

Sea started as a gaming business, Garena, but in 2015 expanded into e-commerce. Sea operates Southeast Asia's largest e-commerce company, Shopee, in terms of gross merchandise value. Shopee is a hybrid C2C and B2C marketplace platform operating in Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brazil. For Garena, Free Fire is the key revenue generating game. Sea’s third business, SeaMoney, provides lending, payment, digital banking, and insurance services.As of March 31, 2025, Forrest Xiaodong Li, the founder, chairman and CEO, owned 59.1% of voting power. Tencent owned 18.5% of issued shares with no voting power.

RELX is a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers in various industries. The company serves sectors such as science and medical research, risk management, and legal. In addition, RELX organizes large-scale digital and face-to-face events such as industry trade shows. Around 60% of revenue is generated in North America and about 20% in Europe.

EBay operates one of the largest e-commerce marketplaces in the world, with $79.6 billion in 2025 gross merchandise volume, rendering the firm a top 10 global e-commerce company. It generates sales from listing fees, advertising, revenue-sharing arrangements with service providers, and managed payments, with its platform connecting about 135 million buyers and roughly 20 million sellers across almost 190 global markets at the end of 2025. EBay generates just north of 50% of its GMV in international markets, with a large presence in the UK, Germany, and Australia.

Carvana Co is an e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars. The company derives revenue from used vehicle sales, wholesale vehicle sales and other sales and revenues. The other sales and revenues include sales of loans originated and sold in securitization transactions or to financing partners, commissions received on VSCs and sales of GAP waiver coverage. The foundation of the business is retail vehicle unit sales. This drives the majority of the revenue and allows the company to capture additional revenue streams associated with financing, VSCs, auto insurance and GAP waiver coverage, as well as trade-in vehicles.

Founded in 1982, Autodesk is a multinational software company best known for pioneering computer-aided design, or CAD, with its AutoCAD product. Nowadays, Autodesk provides design software for a variety of verticals, including architecture & construction, manufacturing, and media & entertainment. Autodesk products have been used in some of the world's most iconic landmarks, like Burj Khalifa, and well-known movie titles like Avatar.

Nebius is a vertically integrated cloud provider focusing on AI and high-performance computing. It is a carve-out of the previous Russian tech firm Yandex, following the Russian sanctions since the Ukraine-Russia war. Nebius designs and operates its own data centers and servers across Europe and the US, with a total capacity of several hundred megawatts. In September 2025, Microsoft became a major Nebius client under a multiyear $17 billion revenue agreement to provide computing capacity.

Idexx Laboratories primarily develops, manufactures, and distributes diagnostic products, equipment, and services for pets and livestock. Its key product lines include single-use canine and feline test kits that veterinarians can employ in the office, benchtop chemistry and hematology analyzers for test-panel analysis on-site, reference lab services, and tests to detect and manage disease in livestock. The firm also offers vet practice management software and consulting services to animal hospitals. Idexx derives roughly 35% of its revenue from outside the United States.

Constellation Software is an acquirer, manager, and developer of vertical market software, or VMS, businesses globally. VMS differentiates from horizontal software in that it provides mission critical solutions within a specific industry for customers in a particular market. Constellation operates through a decentralized model in which each business operates as its own independent entity. Managers of individual businesses are incentivized to optimize their business for returns on invested capital and revenue growth. Excess cash generated by the individual businesses is repatriated to portfolio managers who focus on allocating as much capital as possible on new acquisitions. As of 2025, Constellation consisted of over 1,000 individual businesses and 64,000 employees.

CBRE Group provides a wide range of real estate services to owners, occupants, and investors worldwide, including leasing, property and project management, and capital markets advisory. CBRE’s investment management arm manages over $155 billion for clients across diverse public and private real estate strategies.

Rocket Companies is a financial services company that was originally founded as Rock Financial in 1985 and is currently based in Detroit. Rocket Companies offers a wide array of services and products but is best known for its Rocket Mortgage business. The company’s mortgage lending operations are split between its direct-to-consumer lending, which sees borrowers accessing the company’s lending arm directly through either its mobile app or website, and its partner network where mortgage brokers and other firms use Rocket’s origination process to offer loans to their customers. The company has rapidly gained market share in recent years and will also be the largest mortgage servicer in the US following its acquisition of the Mr. Cooper Group.

Paychex is a technology company providing human capital management solutions, enabling clients to better implement payroll, talent, time, tax, and benefits administration. It has a diverse set of product offerings addressing client needs. Aside from its traditional cloud-based payroll and HCM software offering, which accounts for close to half of total revenue, the company provides outsourcing options. Paychex's administrative service organization and professional employer organization accounts generate over 40% of sales. The balance of revenue is generated through retirement services, insurance solutions, and other products. In fiscal 2025, the company had 800,000 clients and almost 2.5 million worksite employees across its ASO and PEO.