Astera Labs, Inc. — ALAB

[~] I    THE BUSINESS     what they sell, how it earns, who pays
[ ] II   THE MOAT         pricing power, and the clock on it
[ ] III  OWNER EARNINGS   what it really earns, and where the cash goes
[ ] IV   INVERT           what kills it — ranked and dated
[ ] V    THE LADDER       the cycle this name is standing on
[ ] VI   THE PRICE        what you pay against what you get

Resume at Chapter I, beat 2 — how each product family earns.

IDENTITY

Name        Astera Labs, Inc.
            Sells the connectivity chips, boards and cable modules that
            carry data between processors, memory and networks inside
            cloud and AI data centers, each running the company's own
            COSMOS software.
            One operating segment; four product families — Aries
            PCIe/CXL retimers and cable modules · Taurus Ethernet cable
            modules · Leo CXL memory controllers · Scorpio fabric
            switches.
Ticker      ALAB  (Nasdaq Global Select Market)
Form        C-corp
Filed in    Delaware [^1]
HQ          2345 North First Street, San Jose, CA 95131 [^2]
Founded     October 2017 [^1]        Listed  2024-03-20 at $36.00 [^3]
Fiscal year fixed year end, December 31 every year
            Q1 Jan–Mar · Q2 Apr–Jun · Q3 Jul–Sep · Q4 Oct–Dec
            FY2025 ended 2025-12-31 · last reported Q2 to 2026-06-30
Earnings    2026-11-03 estimated [C] — Q3 FY2026, July–September 2026 [^4]
Bought      2025-11-10 aiXscale Photonics GmbH — a German fiber-chip
              coupling specialist, $31.1M cash
            2026-02-09 assets of an unnamed private company in data
              center acceleration, $74.0M [^5]
Made by     TSMC fabricates every IC; ASE and Amkor assemble, package
            and test them — the company owns no fab [^6]
Employees   756 full-time at 2025-12-31 — 527 North America, 208 Asia,
              21 Europe [^7]
Industry    Technology · Semiconductors [^8]
Runs it     Jitendra Mohan, Co-Founder, CEO & Director
              (52, serving 8 years) [^9]
            Sanjay Gajendra, Co-Founder, President, COO & Director
              (51, serving 8 years) [^9]
            Desmond Lynch, CFO (46, serving 5 months) [^9]
            Philip Mazzara, General Counsel & Secretary
              (47, serving 4 years) [^9]
            Manuel Alba, Chair of the board (70, serving 8 years) [^9]
Ownership   10.4% insiders · 75.9% institutions · 13.7% retail [^10]

THE NUMBERS

The opening snapshot — all [F] 2026-08-30 unless tagged otherwise.

Scale       revenue $1,201.9M ttm · 173.49M shares · $50.22B market cap [^11]
Growth      revenue +98.5% y/y ttm [^12]
            revenue  FY23 $115.8M → FY24 $396.3M → FY25 $852.5M →
              $1,201.9M ttm
            EPS  FY23 −$0.71 → FY24 −$0.64 → FY25 $1.22 → $2.02 ttm [M]
Margins     gross 75.1% · operating 22.8% · net 30.7% [^13]
Balance     cash and securities $1,252.9M · debt $0 · net cash $1,252.9M [^14]
            net cash 2.5% of market cap · cap − net cash $48.97B
Capital     no dividend ever declared and no buyback program — all cash
              retained [^15]
            one equity raise since founding: $672.2M net at the 2024 IPO
            stock-based compensation $195.0M ttm, 16.2% of revenue [M]
Price       $289.47 close 2026-08-28 [^16]
            1 wk +1.6% · 1 mo +11.2% · 3 mo −17.1% · 1 yr +53.0% ·
              since IPO +366.7%
            52-wk range $100.27 – $483.02 · since IPO $36.37 – $483.02
EPS         $2.02 trailing [M]  ·  $4.03 FY2026 [C]  ·  $6.39 FY2027 [C] [^17]
P/E         143.3x trailing [M]
            71.8x on FY2026 consensus · 45.3x on FY2027 consensus [C]
            FY23 n/a · FY24 n/m · FY25 136.4x · today 143.3x [^18]

THE BUSINESS

The unit of sale — one device, in three form factors

A customer buys a part and the company ships a part. The same technology sells at three levels of assembly:

IC       the bare chip                  designed here, fabricated by TSMC
board    the chip mounted on a card
module   chip, card and connectors, ready to plug in

The flagship is the Aries retimer, commercially launched in 2020. Inside a server, a PCIe connection carries data between the CPU, the GPUs and storage, and over any real distance the electrical signal degrades. Aries sits in the middle of the run, receives the degraded signal, rebuilds a clean copy of the data and retransmits it.

Revenue since that launch:

2021 $34.8M · 2022 $79.9M · 2023 $115.8M · 2024 $396.3M · 2025 $852.5M

The mix between the three form factors moves price and margin together

The FY2025 10-K and the Q2 2026 10-Q give the same one-sentence account of growth: an increase in overall unit shipments driven by higher demand for Aries, Scorpio and Taurus, "as well as higher overall average selling prices resulting from an increased mix of hardware modules and Scorpio products." Gross margin moves the other way on the same cause — "primarily driven by product mix as we shipped more hardware modules."

                     Q2 2025    Q2 2026     change
revenue              $191.9M    $392.4M       +104%
gross margin           75.8%      73.3%     −250 bps

A module carries the bought-in board and connectors alongside the chip, and those parts sell at a thinner markup than the proprietary silicon — so a sale worth more dollars is worth a smaller share of itself. At last year's rate the quarter would have produced 392.400 × 0.758 = $297.4M of gross profit against the $287.6M reported; the mix shift cost $9.9M in the quarter [M].

Where the gross profit goes

extra gross profit, Q2 2025 → Q2 2026        +$142.0M
extra operating expense                       −$92.5M
                                             ─────────
reached operating income                      +$49.5M

65 cents of every additional dollar of gross profit went back out [M]. Of the $198.3M of Q2 2026 operating expense, $135.9M is research and development — 68.5% of the spend and 34.6% of revenue [M]. Average headcount rose 75% across FY2025.

Taught 2026-08-30: the unit of sale, the form-factor mix, where the gross profit goes. Not yet taught: how each product family earns, the position in the chain, the domain vocabulary, customer concentration, what is hard about it, and the gate.

[^1]: SEC EDGAR entity record, CIK 0001736297, and the IPO prospectus. Incorporated in Delaware in October 2017 under the same name; EDGAR records no former name. Co-founders Jitendra Mohan and Sanjay Gajendra both date their service to November 2017.

[^2]: FY2025 10-K, Item 2. About 154,231 sq ft of leased office, R&D and test space in San Jose, on a lease running to November 2032. Further leased sites in Irvine, Texas, Canada, Germany, India, Singapore, Vietnam and Israel for R&D and support, and in China and Taiwan for customer support and sales. The company owns no facilities. At the IPO the headquarters was 2901 Tasman Drive, Santa Clara.

[^3]: 424B4 filed 2024-03-21. 19,800,000 shares at $36.00 — 16,788,903 sold by the company and 3,011,097 by selling stockholders — priced 2024-03-19, first traded 2024-03-20 on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. Proceeds to the company were $34.02 a share; with the underwriters' over-allotment exercised, FY2024 IPO proceeds were $672.198M. The first close was $62.03, 72.3% above the offering price.

[^4]: The company has not announced the date. It issued its Q3 release on 2025-11-04 and 2024-11-04, filing the 10-Q the following day each time — the pattern the vendor's estimate is built on.

[^5]: Q2 2026 10-Q, Note 6, and FY2025 10-K, Note 6. The February 2026 target is not named: "a privately held company that develops data center acceleration solutions designed to make data storage and processing faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective." It was a purchase of certain assets plus the workforce, for $74.0M — $65.0M cash, $5.0M holdback for general indemnities, $4.0M in shares — of which $68.4M was allocated to goodwill on a preliminary basis. aiXscale was a purchase of 100% of the voting equity for $31.1M all cash, allocated $14.5M to an in-process R&D intangible, −$0.3M to net identifiable assets and the rest to goodwill. Goodwill went $0 to $19.0M across FY2025 and $19.0M to $91.6M in the six months to 2026-06-30.

[^6]: FY2025 10-K, Manufacturing and Suppliers: "We use a fabless manufacturing model and partner with TSMC to fabricate all of our ICs. We use Advanced Semiconductor Engineering and Amkor Technologies to assemble, package, and test our ICs." Modules, boards and IC substrates come from a small number of other partners. The risk factors state that TSMC has raised the wafer prices the company pays and may do so again.

[^7]: FY2025 10-K, Human Capital. To the company's knowledge no employee is represented by a union or covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

[^8]: The vendor feed's classification. SEC EDGAR files ALAB under SIC 3674, "Semiconductors & Related Devices."

[^9]: Ages are as of 2026-04-15, from the proxy filed 2026-04-23. Tenure is years at the company. Mohan and Gajendra co-founded it and have served since November 2017; Gajendra was also CFO and Treasurer from November 2017 to July 2020 and became President in November 2023. Lynch joined as CFO in March 2026 from Rambus, where he had been CFO since August 2022. Mazzara joined in February 2022 as VP of Legal and became General Counsel in September 2022. Alba has chaired the board since March 2018. Mike Tate retired as CFO on 2026-03-02 and intends to serve as a Strategic Advisor to the CEO until 2026-09-01. The vendor feed also lists a co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Casey Morrison; that name appears in neither the FY2025 10-K nor the 2026 proxy, and the company designates no such executive officer.

[^10]: Two sources, two dates. Insiders is the proxy's "all current executive officers, nominees and directors as a group (10 persons)" — 17,751,334 shares, 10.4% of the 171,246,523 outstanding at 2026-03-01; Mohan holds 4.5% and Gajendra 4.3%. Institutions is the vendor feed at 2026-08-30, and retail is the [M] remainder, 100 − 10.4 − 75.9 = 13.7. The same vendor prints insiders at 10.3%, which agrees with the proxy. The only disclosed 5% holders are FMR (13.7%), Vanguard (7.0%) and BlackRock (6.1%).

[^11]: The price is the last settled daily close, from bars. Shares are the 10-Q cover count at 2026-07-31: 173,485,104 × $289.47 = $50.219B. Revenue ttm is the four quarters to 2026-06-30: 852.525 − 351.367 + 700.761 = $1,201.919M, already larger than all of FY2025 with the fiscal year half over.

[^12]: 1,201.919 / 605.549 = 1.985 → +98.5%, against the four quarters to 2025-06-30 (396.290 − 142.108 + 351.367). The EPS ladder is diluted GAAP. FY2023 predates the IPO and ran over 37.1M weighted shares against 179.6M in FY2025, so that year is not comparable on a per-share basis. The ttm figure is [M]: the four reported quarterly diluted EPS sum to 0.50 + 0.25 + 0.44 + 0.83 = $2.02, where Q4 2025's $0.25 is itself derived as 1.22 − 0.97. Net income of $369.494M over the four quarters' average diluted share count of 181.6M gives $2.03, which is what the vendor prints.

[^13]: Gross 902.995 / 1,201.919 = 75.1%; operating 273.445 / 1,201.919 = 22.8%; net 369.494 / 1,201.919 = 30.7%. Net income exceeds operating income by $96.0M over the trailing year. Two things sit in between: $48.6M of non-operating income, almost all interest on the securities portfolio, and a $47.5M income-tax benefit. The benefit is not a low tax rate — the company still carries a valuation allowance against its U.S. deferred tax assets, whose "significant piece of negative evidence" the 10-Q names as the three-year cumulative loss, and its current tax is reduced by excess tax benefits on equity compensation, the foreign-derived intangible income deduction and U.S. R&D credits. The Q2 2026 effective rate was −48.9%. The 10-Q states that a future release of that valuation allowance "may result in a material decrease to income tax expense for the period the release is recorded."

[^14]: At 2026-06-30. The company reports no borrowings of any kind — no notes, no revolver, no convertible; the XBRL carries no debt tag. Cash and equivalents $111.453M plus $1,141.505M of current available-for-sale debt securities = $1,252.958M. Total liabilities are $205.797M, of which $44.413M is operating lease obligations, which are not interest-bearing. Net cash is 1,252.958 / 50,218.7 = 2.5% of market cap [M].

[^15]: The company has never declared a dividend, and the 10-K's option-pricing assumptions use "a dividend yield of zero, as we do not currently issue dividends, nor do we expect to do so in the future." There is no announced repurchase program; FY2025 repurchases were $0 and FY2024's $1.066M was share settlement, not an open-market buyback. Operating cash flow was $319.306M in FY2025 against $37.544M of capital expenditure, and $162.276M in the first half of 2026 against $28.054M. Stock-based compensation over the trailing year was 160.033 − 77.920 + 112.905 = $195.018M, which is 195.018 / 1,201.919 = 16.2% of revenue [M]. Shares outstanding went 170.186M at 2025-12-31 to 173.485M at 2026-07-31, +1.9%.

[^16]: Return windows are calendar, taking the last session on or before the same day of the month: 2026-08-21 $284.97, 2026-07-28 $260.23, 2026-05-28 $349.17, 2025-08-28 $189.15, and the first close 2024-03-20 $62.03. There is no 5-year window — the stock has traded for 2 years 5 months. The ranges are closes; on an intraday basis the 52-week range is $97.89 – $499.48 and the since-IPO low is $36.22. The 52-week high close of $483.02 was 2026-06-30 and the low close of $100.27 was 2026-03-30.

[^17]: Both consensus figures are non-GAAP and are not comparable with the GAAP ladder above. Reported non-GAAP net income for the first half of 2026 was $255.883M against $233.398M GAAP, the difference being $112.905M of stock-based compensation and $1.213M of acquisition costs, less a $1.500M fair-value gain on equity investments and a $90.133M income-tax effect. FY2026 is $4.032 from 21 analysts (range $3.898–$4.333) and FY2027 $6.393 from 23 (range $4.346–$8.799). Revenue consensus is $1.909B for FY2026 and $2.973B for FY2027. The estimates were raised hard after the 2026-08-04 Q2 report: 30 days ago FY2026 stood at $3.015 and FY2027 at $4.531.

[^18]: Each year's multiple is that fiscal year's closing price over the same year's GAAP diluted EPS, both ends at the same date. FY2023 has none — the company was private. FY2024 has none either: a $0.64 loss against a $132.45 close on 2024-12-31. FY2025 is 166.36 / 1.22 = 136.4x. Today is 289.47 / 2.02 = 143.3x, [M] because it inherits the tier of the trailing EPS. The forward multiples are [C], inheriting the consensus EPS they divide by: 289.47 / 4.032 = 71.8x and 289.47 / 6.393 = 45.3x.