Critical Survey: Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE) and Phunware (NASDAQ:PHUN)

Braze (NASDAQ:BRZE) and Phunware (NASDAQ:PHUN) are both technology companies, but which is the superior investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their analyst recommendations, dividends, institutional ownership, profitability, risk, valuation and earnings.

Analyst Ratings

This is a breakdown of recent recommendations and price targets for Braze and Phunware, as provided by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Braze	1	1	20	0	2.86
Phunware	1	1	0	0	1.50

Braze presently has a consensus price target of $38.21, indicating a potential upside of 55.99%. Phunware has a consensus price target of $2.00, indicating a potential upside of 1.78%. Given Braze’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities analysts plainly believe Braze is more favorable than Phunware.

Risk and Volatility

Braze has a beta of 0.88, meaning that its stock price is 12% less volatile than the S&P 500. Comparatively, Phunware has a beta of 2.61, meaning that its stock price is 161% more volatile than the S&P 500.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

90.5% of Braze shares are owned by institutional investors. Comparatively, 7.6% of Phunware shares are owned by institutional investors. 12.5% of Braze shares are owned by company insiders. Comparatively, 0.2% of Phunware shares are owned by company insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that endowments, hedge funds and large money managers believe a stock will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Braze and Phunware’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Braze	-13.55%	-16.11%	-8.86%
Phunware	-471.72%	-13.79%	-12.37%

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Braze and Phunware”s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Braze	$834.24 million	3.31	-$131.29 million	($1.03)	-23.78
Phunware	$2.75 million	14.62	-$11.40 million	($0.65)	-3.02

Phunware has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Braze. Braze is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Phunware, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Summary

Braze beats Phunware on 8 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Braze

Braze, Inc. operates a customer engagement platform that provides interactions between consumers and brands worldwide. The company offers Braze software development kits that automatically manage data ingestion and deliver mobile and web notifications, in-application/in-browser interstitial messages, and content cards; REST API that can be used to import or export data or to trigger workflows between Braze and brands' existing technology stacks; Partner Data Integrations, which allow brands to sync user cohorts from partners; Data Transformation, in which brands can programmatically sync and transform user data; and Braze Cloud Data Ingestion that enables brands to harness their customer data. It also offers classification products, including segmentation that can define reusable segments of consumers based upon attributes, events, or predictive propensity scores; segment insights, which allows customers to analyze how segments are performing relative to each other across a set of pre-selected key performance indicators; and predictive suite that allows customers to identify groups of consumers that are of critical business value. In addition, the company provides Canvas, an orchestration tool that allows customers to create journeys, mapping out multi-steps, and cross-channel messaging experiences; campaigns, which allows customers to send one set of single-channel or multi-channel messages to be delivered to customers in a particular user segment; event and API triggering; marketing pressure management; and reporting and analytics. Further, it offers personalization products, such as liquid templating platform, connected content platform, content blocks, intelligent timing and channel, personalized variant, and AI item recommendations, and catalogs; and action products. The company was formerly known as Appboy, Inc. and changed its name to Braze, Inc. in November 2017. Braze, Inc. was incorporated in 2011 and is headquartered in New York, New York.

About Phunware

Phunware, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides integrated software platform that equips companies with the products, solutions, and services to engage, manage, and monetize their mobile application portfolios in the United States and internationally. The company's products and services include mobile software and application transaction solutions comprise integration of software development kit (SDK) licenses, which consists of analytics that offers data related to application use and engagement; content management that allows application administrators to create and manage app content in a cloud-based portal; alerts, notifications, and messaging, which enables brands to send messages; marketing automation that enables location-triggered messages and workflow; advertising; and location-based services, such as mapping, navigation, wayfinding, workflow, asset management, and policy enforcement. It is also involved in the integration of its SDK licenses into existing applications maintained by its customers, as well as custom application development and support services; and provision of cloud-based vertical solutions for healthcare, retail, sports, aviation, real estate, hospitality, education, and other applications, as well as application transactions, including re-occurring and one-time transactional media purchases for application discovery, user acquisition and audience building, audience engagement, and audience monetization. Phunware, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.