Salesforce surges 23%, triggering a SaaS rebound; Wall Street bets again on traditional software

SaaS stocks rebounded collectively, with Salesforce surging 23% in a single day, reigniting Wall Street’s enthusiasm for software stocks.

After Salesforce released better-than-expected quarterly results, software stocks saw a major rebound on Thursday, reversing the negative sentiment in the SaaS sector that had previously been suppressed by fears of AI replacing such businesses.

Salesforce shares skyrocketed 23% in one day, narrowing their year-to-date loss to about 4%. Previously, the stock had dropped as much as 43% from its closing price at the end of 2025.

(Salesforce shares surged, narrowing year-to-date losses to around 4%)

Other software stocks, including ServiceNow, Figma, and Asana, which had suffered severe setbacks, also rebounded. The cybersecurity sector strengthened in tandem, with CrowdStrike rising 20.5% and Okta jumping 29%, both companies having released earnings on the same day.

(The software sector surged sharply on Thursday)

KeyBanc analyst Jackson Ader commented:

We are all gradually realizing that this industry is more resilient than expected... we aren’t going away... That’s why Salesforce delivered a pretty good, though not outstanding, report yet triggered such a huge market reaction.

Salesforce’s financial figures themselves are not particularly impressive.

According to Wallstreetcn, in the quarter ending July, the company’s revenue growth rate was 11%, a slowdown of 2 percentage points from the first quarter; excluding the impact from the acquisition of Informatica last November, the organic growth rate was only 6.4%.

However, Salesforce provided guidance that organic growth would accelerate slightly in the second half of the year and accordingly raised its full-year revenue outlook. The market’s response to this signal far exceeded the strength shown by the data itself.

Analysts believe this is the logic behind the current rebound: investors had previously dumped related stocks over concerns that AI would disrupt the traditional software model, an overreaction. Software companies’ growth is still ongoing. Even if the pace has slowed, the industry is not on the verge of collapse as some pessimists had predicted.

The market attention triggered by Salesforce’s earnings is not the only recent focus in the technology sector.

According to The Information, NVIDIA has agreed to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, marking the latest case in an ongoing tech M&A wave over the past 18 months.

This wave of acquisitions also includes: Stripe reportedly acquiring OpenRouter for $7 billion, SpaceX acquiring Cursor, Salesforce acquiring Informatica, and Google acquiring Wiz.

The current regulatory environment is markedly different. Tech companies are clearly aware that the window of the current relaxed antitrust climate is limited—about two years remain by estimates—which has in large part accelerated the present pace of acquisitions.