JFrog's June quarter produced gross profit growing faster than its revenue — 31.5% against 28.7% — and its shares have not moved since late August. The Israeli company sells Artifactory, the repository where enterprises store, version and distribute every binary, container and package their software ships, billed per seat and on storage and transfer volume. Its shares closed at $92.33 on September 23, up 0.2% over thirty days and 9.2% below their August 27 peak.

That matters because JFrog belongs to a group of infrastructure software names whose revenue lines are not comparable to each other. Twilio is paid per message sent, per minute connected and per verification checked. Nutanix licenses its hyper-converged platform on annual per-core subscriptions recognized over multi-year terms and meters no usage at all. Gross profit is the one quantity all three earn the same way — and through the spring and summer, the market priced them in precisely the order of its growth: JFrog dearest at 23.94x trailing gross profit, Twilio at 16.31x, Nutanix cheapest at 7.60x, matching gross-profit growth of 31.5%, 20.4% and 14.4%. September broke the pattern at both ends.

Twilio's numbers improved; its September did not come from them

The bear case on Twilio has been that carrier surcharges inflate revenue at zero margin. It is factually wrong on the trend: the gap between revenue growth and gross-profit growth has narrowed for four straight quarters, from 5.5 percentage points a year ago to 1.6 in the June quarter, when operating income reached $84.5m against $37.0m. Twilio's own outlook still assumes about $250m of incremental US pass-through revenue this year, costing roughly 210 basis points of full-year non-GAAP gross margin, and dollar-based net expansion of 116% includes about five points from those fees.

None of that is new. What is new is that Twilio rose 19.9% across September 21–23, to $292.23, on two price-target raises — TD Cowen's Derrick Wood to $300, Rosenblatt's Catharine Trebnick to $290 — with no financial figure disclosed since August 6. The shares finished above Rosenblatt's fresh target. At 16.31x trailing gross profit against roughly 12.4x a month ago and about 7.2x in February, the re-rating runs to 127% in seven months, against management's own guide of 11–12% organic growth this quarter.

Nutanix guides the land-grab down

Nutanix's fourth quarter re-accelerated to 15.9% revenue growth on deferred hardware-tied deals, and roughly 30,000 customers have now migrated from VMware out of the 165,000 it targets. But fiscal 2027 is guided to about 12% growth, net retention is flat at 106%, and the company cut 5% of staff. "We are assuming a moderately higher percentage of orders with future start dates in fiscal year '27 compared to fiscal year '26," chief financial officer Rukmini Sivaraman told investors on August 26.

What the split says

Read together, the three say that this is not one bid on infrastructure software. Across the eight-name group these belong to, the median thirty-day gain is 6.1% and three members are lower than a year ago; enterprise software rallied on September 23 even though the Federal Reserve raised rates 25 basis points on September 16. JFrog's acceleration — cloud at 53% of revenue, net dollar retention of 121%, guidance raised — bought it nothing in September; Twilio's improving margin arithmetic was already in the price before the week that added the most to it. The part of Twilio's move the disclosed business earns ended in August.

Neither company can settle the argument soon. Twilio and JFrog last reported on August 6, Nutanix on August 26; on prior cadence the next operating numbers arrive between late October and late November. Until then the September leg is a price with nothing behind it to check.