Understanding EBITDA, EBIT, NOPAT, Free Cash Flow, ROIC, and the economics behind investment decisions. By Hurratul | The U Lab A company reports $100 million in revenue. Another reports a 75% gross margin. A third announces $20 million in EBITDA. Which one is the better business? We do not know. The first might be growing rapidly but losing money on every additional sale. The second might have attractive delivery economics but spend heavily on customer acquisition. The third

The U Lab | October 24, 2026 ElevenLabs doubled its private-market valuation in less than eight months. But the more important financial distinction is where the investors' money went. The Signal On February 4, 2026, ElevenLabs announced a $500 million Series D funding round at an $11 billion valuation.¹ On September 30, the AI voice company announced a $300 million employee tender offer at a $22 billion valuation.² The valuation doubled. But the two transactions had fundamen

6 of the cloud and AI infrastructure sellers in PitchBook’s latest analysis are sitting on $2.47 trillion of contracted backlog.¹ PitchBook’s data shows backlogs have more than tripled since early 2025. Every one of those dollars has been won. None of them has been earned yet. AI demand is real, it’s accelerating, and the firms with the biggest backlogs are winning. Microsoft leads at $678 billion. Oracle follows at $638 billion. Whether anyone actually wants this compute is

Anthropic’s new biology lab highlights a binding-constraint problem in AI-driven protein design. Computational design is getting faster. Physical validation does not automatically scale at the same rate. When more candidates are selected for testing than wet labs can validate, the bottleneck can move downstream to experimental validation. The next constraints can include assay throughput, measurement quality, laboratory automation, and the speed at which experimental results