Denali Therapeutics Inc.
DNLI · Healthcare · $3.6B mkt cap · FY2025 filings · No moat ·
Doesn't clear the bar
The five investor questions
2021–2023 (latest 3 aligned FYs; v3 window cap 5): revenue $48.7M to $331M, increasing; diluted EPS -2.39 to -1.06, increasing.
Not enough years of gross-margin data to score pricing power.
Median ROIC -32.7%, above the 12% hurdle in 0% of years.
Net cash position — no leverage risk.
Owner earnings trend unclear, share count growing (dilution).
The pricingPower component abstained: Not enough years of gross-margin data to score pricing power. The other four 20% weights were renormalized over the scored 80%.
Price vs. conservative owner-earnings floor
A cautious baseline, not a price target: what the shares may support if normalized owner earnings simply hold steady.
- Owner earnings (normalized)
- Not reported
- Owner-earnings floor / share
- Unavailable — insufficient owner-earnings data
- Capped-growth comparison / share
- Unavailable — insufficient growth-model data
- Recent price
- $23.32
- Price vs. owner-earnings floor
- No price data
This floor assumes trailing owner earnings persist — unreliable for declining businesses. The recent FY revenue series does not trigger the three-consecutive-declines flag.
Cohort context: median current price is 232% above the floor across 48 of the current top 50 companies by Moat Score with both values.
Score records captured Jul 23, 2026.
Exactly which 50 companies?
FTNT, META, MEDP, IBEX, MSFT, GOOGL, LULU, ANF, IDXX, TXRH, FHI, QLYS, FFIV, ADBE, MANH, VEEV, GRMN, SSD, MNST, DOCS, MCO, CPRT, NTAP, LRCX, NVDA, CORT, SFM, MPTI, ULTA, SN, RMD, ROL, PAYC, IRMD, INTU, DECK, MORN, LGCY, DAL, GWW, ISRG, MPWR, CTAS, LOPE, CMG, FAST, BKNG, ORLY, GGG, JKHY
Missing a usable price or floor: ANF, BKNG.
Model details under moat-index@3.0.0: zero-growth floor 11.1×, capped-growth comparison at no more than 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 0% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
11 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
It earned −54.3% on invested capital in FY2025, with a median of −32.7% across 9 filed years. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 0/100.
DNLI's filings don't disclose total debt in a form the methodology can use, so leverage is treated as unmeasured — never assumed to be zero.
The share count rose 78.5% between FY2017 and FY2025 — existing owners have been diluted over the record. Capital Discipline scores it 24/100.
This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.
Not disclosed in DNLI’s filings for these years — we don’t estimate it.
Gaps in a line mean that item isn’t in DNLI’s filings for that year — the series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Moat Score history
Breaks in the line mark methodology upgrades — readings scored by different engine versions aren’t compared, so a level shift there isn’t a change in the business.
Tier changesSame-methodology crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@2.0.0tomoat-index@3.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 23, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record can’t be backfilled, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Track record
How Denali Therapeutics Inc.’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored DNLI on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The price path is a total-return (dividends reinvested) index built from the same data the forward returns use; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the reconstructed history shown, DNLI did not rate Wide-moat in any year, so there is no wide-moat track record to report. That absence is itself the honest answer — we don’t manufacture a comparison where the rating never earned one.
Healthcare context
#464 of 719 scored Healthcare companies, ranked by Moat Score.
Nearest peers by Moat Score
- #462QUCY Quantum Cyber N.V.34.9 out of 100, No moatNo moat
- #463MRNA Moderna, Inc.34.8 out of 100, No moatNo moat
- #465BEAM Beam Therapeutics Inc.34.8 out of 100, No moatNo moat
- #466AGL agilon health, inc.34.8 out of 100, No moatNo moat
Compare DNLI with its nearest peers →All Healthcare companies on the Index →
Common questions about DNLI
- Does Denali Therapeutics Inc. have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2025 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores Denali Therapeutics Inc. (DNLI) 34.8 out of 100 — below the Shallow-moat bar, so no moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 60, pricing power not measurable from the filings, returns on capital 0, balance-sheet safety 55, capital discipline 24.
- How has DNLI's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 12 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 34.8 out of 100 (no moat). No tier changes on record yet. (Methodology upgrades on Jul 20, 2026, Jul 23, 2026 re-based the score; readings across engine versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.