Sprout Social (NASDAQ:SPT) trading 10.1% higher - should you buy? July 27, 2026 Key points. * Sprout Social shares jumped 10.1% to $8.33 in Monday trading, though volume was about 85% below the average session volume. * Analyst sentiment remains mixed: the stock has a consensus "Hold" rating and an average price target of $11.88, with ratings split among Buy, Hold and Sell recommendations. * The company exceeded quarterly earnings and revenue estimates, but continues to report negative profitability metrics; an insider also sold 40,000 shares at an average price of $8.28 under a pre-arranged trading plan. * MarketBeat previews top five stocks to own in August. Sprout Social, Inc. (NASDAQ:SPT - Get Free Report)'s share price was up 10.1% during trading on Monday. The company traded as high as $8.34 and last traded at $8.3320. 234,595 shares changed hands during trading, a decline of 85% from the average session volume of 1,516,848 shares. The stock had previously closed at $7.57. Wall Street analyst weigh in. Several equities analysts have weighed in on the company. Barclays increased their target price on Sprout Social from $8.00 to $9.00 and gave the company an "overweight" rating in a research note on Monday, May 11th. Weiss Ratings reaffirmed a "sell (e+)" rating on shares of Sprout Social in a research note on Friday, July 17th. Four research analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, four have assigned a Hold rating and two have assigned a Sell rating to the company's stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of "Hold" and a consensus target price of $11.88. Sprout Social stock performance. The firm has a market cap of $513.64 million, a P/E ratio of -12.95 and a beta of 0.99. The company has a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.15, a quick ratio of 0.95 and a current ratio of 0.95. The stock's 50-day moving average is $7.45 and its 200 day moving average is $7.20. Sprout Social (NASDAQ:SPT - Get Free Report) last posted its earnings results on Thursday, May 7th. The company reported $0.23 earnings per share for the quarter, topping the consensus estimate of $0.16 by $0.07. Sprout Social had a negative return on equity of 13.90% and a negative net margin of 8.18%.The firm had revenue of $121.50 million for the quarter, compared to analyst estimates of $120.33 million. Sprout Social has set its Q2 2026 guidance at 0.150-0.160 EPS and its FY 2026 guidance at 0.880-0.970 EPS. On average, research analysts predict that Sprout Social, Inc. will post -0.31 earnings per share for the current year. Insider buying and selling. In other Sprout Social news, insider Justyn Russell Howard sold 40,000 shares of the stock in a transaction dated Friday, July 10th. The stock was sold at an average price of $8.28, for a total transaction of $331,200.00. Following the completion of the transaction, the insider owned 7,417 shares in the company, valued at approximately $61,412.76. This represents a 84.36% decrease in their position. The transaction was disclosed in a document filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission, which is accessible through this link. The transaction was executed under a pre-arranged Rule 10b5-1 trading plan. Corporate insiders own 9.60% of the company's stock. Institutional investors weigh in on Sprout Social. A number of hedge funds and other institutional investors have recently bought and sold shares of SPT. Summit Securities Group LLC boosted its position in Sprout Social by 399.0% during the 4th quarter. Summit Securities Group LLC now owns 2,520 shares of the company's stock worth $28,000 after acquiring an additional 2,015 shares during the last quarter. Quadrant Capital Group LLC bought a new stake in shares of Sprout Social in the fourth quarter worth $28,000. Essential Partners LLC boosted its holdings in Sprout Social by 724.9% during the first quarter. Essential Partners LLC now owns 6,550 shares of the company's stock worth $37,000 after purchasing an additional 5,756 shares during the last quarter. GAMMA Investing LLC boosted its holdings in Sprout Social by 115.8% during the second quarter. GAMMA Investing LLC now owns 6,368 shares of the company's stock worth $48,000 after purchasing an additional 3,417 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Quarry LP grew its position in Sprout Social by 264.2% in the third quarter. Quarry LP now owns 3,784 shares of the company's stock valued at $49,000 after purchasing an additional 2,745 shares in the last quarter. About Sprout Social. Sprout Social NASDAQ: SPT is a Chicago-based software company specializing in social media management solutions for businesses of all sizes. The company provides a cloud-based platform designed to help organizations improve their social media presence through a suite of tools for content scheduling, community engagement, social listening and analytics. Sprout Social's platform is built to streamline the workflows of marketing, customer care and public relations teams by providing a centralized hub for managing multiple social channels. The company's product offerings include publishing and scheduling capabilities that allow users to plan and automate social content across networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to [email protected]. Before you consider Sprout Social, you'll want to hear this. MarketBeat keeps track of Wall Street's top-rated and best performing research analysts and the stocks they recommend to their clients on a daily basis. MarketBeat has identified the five stocks that top analysts are quietly whispering to their clients to buy now before the broader market catches on... and Sprout Social wasn't on the list. While Sprout Social currently has a Hold rating among analysts, top-rated analysts believe these five stocks are better buys. Enter your email address and we'll send you MarketBeat's list of ten stocks set to soar in Summer 2026, despite the threat of tariffs and what's happening in Iran. These ten stocks are incredibly resilient and are likely to thrive in any economic environment.

Signal #64: bosch leaves Sofia, Vertiv arrives in Zagreb. Bosch is closing a 670-person engineering centre in Bulgaria while Vertiv opens 200 roles in Croatia and Austrian Post buys 1,300 employees in Belgrade. Meanwhile a US software company cut a fifth of its staff and the stock rallied, and in twelve days the EU AI Act can fine you 3% of global revenue. Jul 21, 2026 In partnership with Three of this week's stories are about headcount, and none of them run the way you would expect. A US software company cut a fifth of its people and was rewarded for it the same day. Bosch is winding down a Sofia engineering centre in the same month Vertiv starts hiring in Zagreb. A 275-person company in Bengaluru is now worth $1.5B. The line running through all three is that a payroll has stopped being evidence of capacity. Then there is a clock: in twelve days the EU AI Act stops being paperwork and becomes enforceable, and the penalty is a share of your worldwide revenue rather than a fixed fee. Sprout Social cut a fifth of its staff and the stock went up. Sprout Social's board approved cutting about 260 roles on July 8, roughly 20% of the company, and staff were notified the week of July 14. The company's 8-K puts the restructuring charge at $18M to $20M pre-tax, almost all of it cash severance hitting Q3. In the same filing it said Q2 revenue would land at the high end of prior guidance and described the cuts as funding investment in AI-powered social intelligence. The market took it as good news. The pairing is what matters. Removing a fifth of a company used to be an admission that demand had gone; here it was presented as a margin improvement with a growth story stapled to it, and the shares moved up. Challenger's half-year data says this is general rather than local: 139,156 announced tech cuts through June against 76,214 a year earlier, an 83% rise, with AI named in 101,743 announced cuts across all sectors and leading the stated reasons four months running. Your investors have now watched this work on someone else's tape. Before your next board meeting, get honest about which functions in your company produce revenue and which coordinate the people who do, because that is the line the cuts are being drawn along. The people doing the coordinating deserve to hear it from you in July rather than read it in an 8-K in November. Cut lead review from hours to minutes. Ask Attio to build a daily workflow that surfaces the deals that need your attention today, like anything with a stage change, a recent reply, or a new signal in the last 24 hours. Review your pipeline in Claude, synced live from Attio via MCP. That's it. Bosch leaves Sofia, Vertiv arrives in Zagreb. Bosch confirmed it will close its Sofia Tech Park engineering centre by mid-2027, around 400 people this year and another 270 next, roughly two thirds of its Sofia headcount, with structural change in the car industry given as the reason. Six hundred kilometres northwest, Vertiv is opening more than 200 engineering, project management and manufacturing roles in Zagreb and Rugvica, building modular data centres and cooling systems shipped across EMEA. And on Tuesday Austrian Post bought Serbia's D Express outright, 1,300 employees and 27 distribution bases, folding it into its existing City Express. Read the three together and the shape is a re-sort, not a decline. The engineering centres that Western manufacturers planted across the region in the 2010s to do cost-arbitrage R&D are unwinding, and the operators staffing up in the same countries are building physical AI infrastructure and logistics instead. Same engineers, different buyer, and a different century of industry. The Sofia roles are not coming back in the shape they left. For anyone hiring in the region, this is the most generous window Bulgaria has offered in a decade: 670 experienced embedded and systems engineers reaching the market over eighteen months, in a city where nobody else was letting go. Start the conversations now rather than in 2027 when the second tranche lands and everyone else has noticed. Watch who absorbs them, because that tells you which industry sets wages in Sofia next year. A 275-person company in Bengaluru is worth $1.5B. Emergent raised roughly $130M in a Series C at a $1.5B valuation on July 15, led by Creaegis and co-led by Ranjan Pai's Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global. In January the same company raised $70M at $300M with SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Khosla. That is five times the price in four months. It runs on about 275 people, most of them in Bengaluru, and crossed $50M in annual recurring revenue within seven months of launch. Set that against the Sprout Social filing and the picture sharpens. Headcount is being repriced in both directions at once: as a cost to strip out of a mature company, and as a signal of efficiency in a young one. What the cap table paid five times for was not the team's size but the revenue per person and the cost base it sits on. A company operating out of Bengaluru, Sofia, Belgrade or Pristina is no longer taking a discount for it. The practical version for founders in this region is to stop apologising for where you are built. Put revenue per employee and gross burn per engineer at the front of your deck instead of headcount growth, and quote your costs in the currency you actually pay them in. Worth testing this month: run your last twelve months against the same two ratios Emergent is being priced on and see whether your story is stronger than the one you have been telling. In twelve days Brussels can fine you 3% of global revenue. The EU AI Act's obligations for general-purpose models have been law since August 2025, but the AI Office had no power to punish anyone for ignoring them. That changes on August 2, when the office can demand documentation, evaluate models itself, order corrective measures, and restrict or withdraw a model from the EU market. The Article 101 ceiling is 3% of total worldwide annual turnover or €15M, whichever is higher. The trap is procedural rather than technical. Failing to answer an information request adequately, or answering it in a misleading way, is separately sanctionable at that same ceiling, which means the first real exposure most companies face is a letter with a deadline rather than a finding about their model. Note also what did not arrive: the Digital Omnibus adopted on June 29 pushed standalone high-risk obligations out to December 2027. General-purpose models are the piece landing now. Anyone fine-tuning, hosting or redistributing a general-purpose model into the EU should name one person this week who owns the reply if that letter arrives, and make sure the model documentation they would send already exists rather than being assembled under a clock. If you only consume models through an API, ask your provider for their GPAI documentation before August 2 and keep the answer. Their compliance is about to become a fact you depend on. Short signals. Five tools shipped this week worth your time. Sales ran empty, nothing verifiable landed in the window. Productivity: Notion's agent can now run your calendar. Notion gave its agent calendar tools on July 16, so it can show and manage your schedule, send invites, join calls and find a time that works across a group, all from chat. Say "connect your calendar" or turn it on in Settings, then Connections. Desktop only for now. Hand it your worst scheduling chore this week, the recurring one with four attendees in three time zones. Design: Figma pulls code and live sites onto canvas with your tokens attached. As of July 16, designs copied from Figma Make, generated through the Figma MCP server, or captured from a web page with the Chrome extension now bind colour, type and spacing to the variables already in your file instead of hardcoded values, and arrive with auto layout. Point the extension at your own marketing site and pull it back as editable, token-bound layers. Marketing: beehiiv shipped a paywall you can meter and an agent that works your list. The summer release on July 16 put Copilot, a native in-app agent, alongside a drag-and-drop visual editor on every plan, plus a metered paywall, paid trials, and group subscriptions. Podcast hosting is now on all plans at zero revenue share. Set the meter at three free premium posts a month and let Copilot build the upgrade sequence off your most engaged segment. Dev: Cursor's Slack agent now tells you the plan before it acts. Cursor's July 17 update makes the agent post a plan first so you can redirect it early, work in named multi-repo environments with a switch-repository control mid-task, and read from and post into other channels and threads. Give it one small, well-scoped bug from your backlog in a Slack thread and judge it on the plan rather than the patch. Productivity: Gemini in Docs now writes in Polish, Czech and Turkish. Google added eleven languages to Help me write, Help me create, Match writing style and Match doc format from July 15, including Polish, Czech, Turkish, Hebrew, Dutch and the Nordics. For teams writing in a local language and reporting in English, the style-matching is the useful part. Feed it a doc written by your best writer and have it draft the next three in that voice. Next edition soon,

Sprout Social named as a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner(R) Magic Quadrant(TM) for Social Media Management and Listening. Sprout Social views this recognition as a reflection of its commitment to AI-powered Social Intelligence and its strategy to turn real-time social signals into business decisions, driven by its proprietary AI agent, Trellis. CHICAGO - July 10, 2026 - Sprout Social (NASDAQ: SPT), the AI-powered Social Intelligence Platform, today announced it has been recognized as a Visionary in the inaugural Gartner(R) Magic Quadrant(TM) for Social Media Management and Listening. This Magic Quadrant evaluates seven vendors and helps organizations select the right partner to seamlessly connect real-time social intelligence with comprehensive management execution. Sprout Social believes this recognition reflects the strength of its vision and its leadership in shaping the future of the category. Social media provides some of the earliest signals of where markets, consumers and culture are headed. Sprout Social understands that organizations that can identify and act on those signals are better positioned to anticipate change, strengthen customer relationships and drive business impact. That insight has shaped Sprout's AI-powered Social Intelligence platform, powered by its proprietary AI agent, Trellis, which helps transform real-time social signals into actionable intelligence. "We see Gartner's new Magic Quadrant for this category as a major milestone for social media management and its role in how organizations compete," said Scott Morris, Chief Marketing Officer, Sprout Social. "We're thrilled to be recognized as a Visionary, a position we believe reflects our commitment to anticipating market shifts and equipping our customers with the tools they need to build innovative, consumer-first brands that deliver real business results." "Our focus is centered on transforming social media from an isolated marketing channel into an enterprise-wide system of intelligence and action," said Srinivas Somayajula, Chief Product Officer at Sprout Social. "Over the past year, we have delivered on this strategy by expanding our conversational AI agent, Trellis, across the Sprout ecosystem. By combining these real-time capabilities with NewsWhip's predictive analytics and our fully reimagined influencer marketing platform, we are giving brands the high-velocity solution designed to look around corners and help drive predictable business outcomes." To learn more about Sprout Social's Social Intelligence platform and AI capabilities, visit sproutsocial.com. Gartner Disclaimer Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. About Sprout Social Sprout Social is a leading AI-powered social intelligence platform, built on the belief that All Business is Social(SM). Powered by Trellis, Sprout's proprietary AI agent, the platform is designed to transform real-time social media signals into actionable insights that drive business forward. Consistently recognized as a top software by G2, Sprout enables brands to deliver smarter, faster business impact through a suite of solutions including comprehensive publishing and engagement, customer care, influencer marketing, advocacy and predictive media intelligence. Sprout's software operates across all major social networks and digital platforms. For more information about Sprout Social (NASDAQ: SPT), visit sproutsocial.com. www.x.com/SproutSocial www.x.com/SproutSocialIR www.facebook.com/SproutSocialInc www.linkedin.com/company/sprout-social-inc-/ www.instagram.com/sproutsocial