Now that it has become the largest corporate holder of bitcoin (BTC), it’s possible that some investors may forget – or not even know – what it is that MicroStrategy (MSTR) actually does.
That’s because the company – which now operates under the name Strategy – and its founder Michael Saylor have become so associated with the rapid growth of bitcoin over the past several years, it’s now overshadowed its business-analytics software business.
The company began buying BTC in 2020 with the goal of building a bitcoin treasury, becoming the first publicly traded company to purchase crypto as part of its capital allocation strategy.
Strategy first bought 21,454 bitcoins – worth over $250 million at the time.
It recently acquired an additional 245 bitcoins for $26 million and now owns 592,345 bitcoins as of June 23.
In fact JPMorgan recently flagged Strategy’s inclusion on the Nasdaq index as a possible risk because of its continued aggressive bitcoin acquisitions.
The company’s crypto accumulation “has transformed MicroStrategy into a leveraged Bitcoin fund, raising concerns about its continued inclusion in major equity indices,” as Investing.com reported.
Nonetheless, Saylor’s strategy of building a bitcoin treasury for capital allocation purposes has now become widely emulated as crypto becomes increasingly mainstream.
Alleviating ‘one of the greatest barriers to AI adoption’
But last week the company shifted away from crypto and back toward its software business by announcing the release of Strategy Mosaic, an AI powered “universal intelligence layer” platform designed to connect disparate data sources across enterprises to support AI applications.
The company said in a press release that as organizations modernize their data structures, the siloed systems within these structures produce inconsistent metrics, and also leads to governance gaps.
The “lack of clean, connected, and organized data” has created “one of the greatest barriers to AI adoption,” it said.
Strategy Mosaic was built to provide consistent and secure access to information across all AI applications.
"With Mosaic, we’ve broken through the biggest barriers to business innovation: data silos, conflicting metrics, and high data transformation costs," Saurabh Abhyankar, chief product officer at Strategy, said in a statement. "Our powerful semantic graph ensures a single source of truth for enterprise analytics, and Mosaic extends this with a universal layer of intelligence compatible with any cloud, reporting tool, and data source."
The platform’s features include a semantic layer that ensures consistent business definitions and metrics across data sources.
It also offers universal access through various APIs, as well as AI-powered data modeling through its Mosaic Studio.
The company said the Mosaic Studio can automate data preparation and modeling tasks 10 times faster than traditional methods.
The move to build out its AI business could be a smart long-term move, as the company posted a $5.9 billion unrealized bitcoin loss for the first quarter, according to an SEC filing in April.
However, with bitcoin rallying once again, Saylor could look to continue ramping up his BTC holdings, which he mostly funds by issuing stock, preferred shares, and convertible bonds.
Bitcoin was trading below $80,000 in April after a steep decline in Q1 – but was back up near $107,000 on Friday.
And Wall Street is thus far solidly bullish on its bitcoin treasury playbook.
Strategy’s stock is up 32.6% YTD and has soared 151.7% over the past year.
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