Baron SMID Cap ETF

Axon Enterprise, Inc. (AXON) is a public safety company with three major product lines: high-definition body and vehicle cameras (sensor division), subscription-based digital evidence services and storage, and non-lethal taser devices.
With over $2 billion in sales in 2024, Axon has less than 3% share of its $77 billion addressable market. Building off its dominant position in tasers, Axon is seeking to grow its software business from approximately 41% of revenue today to over 55% towards the end of the decade, which, in turn, should enhance margins. We think Axon can increase EBITDA margins to over 25%, with sustained revenue growth greater than 20%. Axon is a winner-take-most company in its markets, given its reputation, scale, and integration of evidentiary products with sensors and tasers.

Rubrik, Inc.

Samsara Inc. (IOT) provides a cloud-based software platform for vehicle telematics, video-based driver safety, workflow automation, equipment monitoring, and manufacturing site visibility. The platform analyzes data from millions of sensors and cameras to help companies reduce costs and improve safety.
Samsara has been rapidly gaining market share in the $51 billion connected fleet software market, driven by its superior cloud-native architecture, ability to address both safety and telematics use cases, and its proprietary data moat (14 trillion data points collected annually across more than a million assets). The company has leveraged its strong position in commercial fleets to expand into adjacent areas such as construction equipment monitoring and driver workflow automation, increasing its value to customers.

Forgent Power Solutions, Inc.

Guidewire Software, Inc. (GWRE) is a leading provider of core systems software to the global property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry.
Guidewire is a small player in a vast addressable market and benefits from P&C insurers’ need to upgrade 30-year-old systems. The company offers best-in-class functionality, as evidenced by its growing installed base and near-100% retention rates. After a multi-year transition period, we think Guidewire’s cloud migration is largely complete, and we expect accelerating revenue, expanding margins, and improving free cash flow over the next several years. We believe recent M&A in the vertical software space supports a meaningful value creation opportunity for shareholders.

Coherent Corp. (COHR) develops, manufactures, and markets advanced materials, lasers, and optical systems designed to generate, modulate, amplify, direct, and detect photons, the fundamental particles of light.
Coherent is positioned to benefit from secular communications tailwinds driven by AI data center buildouts, growing data center interconnect demand, increasing optical penetration within server racks, advances in optical switching, and the migration of traditional telecom networks to pluggable transceivers. In addition to these structural drivers, the company’s operational initiatives, including margin expansion, debt reduction, and diversification of its global supply chain, continue to support its improving financial profile.

Dynatrace, Inc. (DT) is a leading provider of application performance monitoring, offering a full-stack solution spanning user monitoring, infrastructure, and log management. To meet the demands of the modern software stack, the company re-architected its platform and expanded into security monitoring.
With its new platform, Dynatrace is better equipped to address complex use cases across multi-cloud, containerized, and hybrid environments. Estimates suggest only about 20% of enterprise applications are currently monitored, a figure expected to rise to 50% in the coming years. The growing application economy should drive greater monitoring demand as existing apps expand and new ones are developed. Dynatrace is well positioned to capture this opportunity through its differentiated platform, enterprise-grade solutions, expanding salesforce, and ongoing product innovation.

Loar Holdings Inc. (LOAR) is a niche aerospace components manufacturer. Founded in 2012, the company has an 85% proprietary product portfolio, with more than half of its revenue coming from the high-margin aftermarket channel.
Loar’s proprietary, aftermarket-focused products represent one of the strongest business models in the aerospace and defense industry, exemplified by the success of peers such as TransDigm. Loar benefits from favorable industry growth trends and strong pricing power given the critical nature of its components. The company has executed a disciplined acquisition strategy, successfully integrating more than 17 acquisitions over the past 13 years. We believe Loar is well positioned to deliver strong double-digit growth for the foreseeable future.

Datadog, Inc. (DDOG) offers an SaaS-based observability platform that helps businesses keep software and applications up and running. Core products include infrastructure, application performance monitoring, log management, and cloud security to provide visibility into and secure IT environments.
Datadog employs a viral go-to-market strategy and an expanding product line to generate growth through its land-and-expand business model. It is also rapidly increasing its platform capabilities with a broad use, single-pane-of-glass strategy. With strong secular trends, a large total addressable market, a flexible platform, solid unit economics, and a robust product line, we believe Datadog is well positioned to generate significant growth over the coming years.

Mercury Systems, Inc. (MRCY) designs, manufactures, and markets high-performance, embedded, real-time digital signal and image processing systems, mission systems, and software. The company's customers are Tier-1 defense contractors worldwide.
We believe Mercury is uniquely positioned to sell high-speed computing and storage subsystems to nearly all large U.S. defense contractors. Its products, which let customers more rapidly and cheaply develop their own solutions, are used for mission management, communications, sensors, electronic warfare, and other systems. Mercury serves an available market of over $40 billion, including $24 billion for C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence) systems and $18 billion for sensor and mission systems (electronic warfare, radar, and weapons).

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