OUST

Ouster's operating business is improving on every line that matters: FY2025 revenue grew 52.5% to $169M, gross profit jumped 106.2% to $83.4M (gross margin ~49%), and the net loss narrowed to -$60.4M from -$97.0M. The balance sheet is clean — $262M equity, $87.8M total liabilities (0.34x), no long-term debt, and current assets of $279M against $71.0M current liabilities. For a post-Velodyne-merger lidar consolidator, this is the healthiest the financials have looked, and management is right that the simplified two-chip digital architecture and Thailand contract manufacturing (Benchmark, Fabrinet) give a cost path as volumes scale.

But this is a stock call, not a company call, and the price has run far ahead of the fundamentals. At $54.07 the market cap is $3.40B — 20x trailing sales — for a hardware business (49% gross margin, not software economics) that has never earned a profit, posted a -43.7% operating margin, and burned $40M of operating cash in FY2025 against just $67.4M of cash on hand. That is roughly a year-and-a-half of runway before another raise, and the share count already grew 16.8% year-over-year, so existing holders are being diluted into the growth. The $973.4M accumulated deficit and management's own language — 'we expect to continue to incur losses for the foreseeable future' and 'there can be no assurance that we will ever achieve or sustain profitability' — are not boilerplate here; they describe the base case.