UiPath reported earnings on September 2 and now trades at $18.14 — down 2.8% on the session but still up 9% on the week, leaving the post-print picture more nuanced than either the bulls or bears expected.
The most notable development this week came from the analyst desk. UBS raised its price target on PATH to $19 from $12 — a 58% lift — while keeping its Neutral rating, filed the morning after the print. RBC Capital had already moved in a similar direction two weeks prior, nudging its own target from $12 to $15. Both firms are raising from a low base: the consensus mean sits at $13.87, well below the current price. That gap matters. Even after a string of upward revisions, the Street's aggregate target implies meaningful downside from here, and the dominant rating across the analyst community remains a hold-equivalent. Bank of America still carries an Underperform, and Morgan Stanley cut its target to $15 in late May. The bull case — 14% revenue growth, ARR climbing to $1.85 billion, a growing cohort of large customers — is real. So is the bear case: DBNRR falling to 107%, limited margin expansion, and valuation multiples that have re-rated sharply higher as the stock ran up 42% over the past month.
Positioning heading into and out of the print is a study in contrasts. Short interest remains heavy at 25.5% of the free float — one of the larger short positions in enterprise software — but it has been grinding lower. Shares short have fallen roughly 3% over the past week and are down from peaks above 120 million in mid-August. The borrow market tells the same story: availability has loosened dramatically, now at 228% — more than two shares available to lend for every one already borrowed — up from around 104% at the end of July. Cost to borrow has drifted lower too, ending the period at just 0.45%, well off the 0.72% peak in early August. Shorts are not being squeezed out of the pool; they are choosing to reduce. The put/call ratio at 0.61 is still running about 1.8 standard deviations above its 20-day average, a residual defensiveness that may reflect investors who hedged into the print and have not yet unwound. The ORTEX short score eased slightly to 61.3 — down from 63.5 a week ago — consistent with a modest improvement in the short-side setup but still in elevated territory.
The ownership picture has one thread worth tracking. Tetragon Financial added nearly 4.5 million shares last quarter, lifting its stake to around 4.3% of shares outstanding. BlackRock added 3.1 million shares in the same period. Both moves suggest institutional appetite even as the stock was trading at lower levels. Daniel Dines, founder and CEO, remains the dominant holder at 17.6% of shares — though his stake has been declining gradually through a pre-arranged 10b5-1 selling plan. His January trades, all under the plan, totalled over $5.7 million in disposals. Planned sales under 10b5-1 carry less signal than discretionary ones, but the steady cadence is worth noting for shareholders watching the founder's long-term posture.
Among close peers, CRM stands out — up 25% on the week after its own results, dramatically outpacing PATH's 9% move. NOW added 12.5%, while DOCU and GTLB put up mid-single-digit gains. CXM and APPN lagged badly, each down on the day. The software sector's post-earnings moves are wide and idiosyncratic this cycle. PATH's comparatively muted response — given the scale of the prior rally — is consistent with a stock where the move had largely been front-run, shorts were already reducing, and the consensus remained sceptical.
The next focal point is whether the analyst community follows UBS's lead and begins closing the gap between the $13.87 consensus target and a stock now trading at $18.14 — or whether the weight of hold-equivalent ratings and lingering margin concerns holds targets in place while the stock either consolidates or retreats.
See the live data behind this article on ORTEX.
Open PATH on ORTEX →ORTEX Market Intelligence content is generated by AI from a snapshot of ORTEX's proprietary data. Content is informational only and does not constitute investment advice.
