Baron Large Cap Growth Strategy

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) sells semiconductors, systems, and software for accelerated computing, gaming, and generative AI.
Computing demand has been doubling every one to two years, driven by electrification, digitization, and recent advancements in AI, yet supply growth has decelerated dramatically due to the slowdown in Moore's law. NVIDIA’s accelerated computing architecture enables continued growth in computing capacity through parallelization. We are at the tipping point of a new era in computing, with NVIDIA at its epicenter as generative AI adoption grows. With leading market share in gaming, data centers, and autonomous machines, we think NVIDIA is well positioned for long-term growth.

Meta Platforms, Inc. (META) owns Facebook, the world's largest social network, with over 3.0 billion monthly and over 2.1 billion daily active users. Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Oculus are also part of the Meta Platforms network, with over 3.4 billion total daily unique users across Meta products.
Meta owns unique social platforms with users that continue to demonstrate stickiness and high engagement. Advertisers want to be where users are, and Meta's ability to analyze, target, and show clear, demonstrable, and rising returns on investment makes the platform particularly attractive to them. We believe the company has significant room to further monetize its vast customer base, especially internationally. In addition, we see significant positive optionality from monetization opportunities in generative AI features, video, WhatsApp, and business messaging.

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) is an e-commerce pioneer, innovator, and market share leader with a relentless focus on providing value and convenience to its customers. Amazon also operates the industry-leading cloud infrastructure business Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Amazon's market share of U.S. online retail sales is around 40%, while its share of global retail sales is less than 5%. Amazon has many avenues for revenue growth, including consumer staples, international expansion, digital media offerings, private label, pharmacy and health care services, advertising, and a better shopping experience powered by generative AI. Amazon also represents an opportunity to invest in the secular growth of cloud computing through AWS—a large, fast-growing, and margin-accretive part of the business.

Shopify Inc. (SHOP) is a cloud-based software provider offering an operating system for multi-channel commerce. The company serves over 2 million merchants that processed $292 billion of gross merchandise value (GMV) in 2024. Shopify is the second-largest e-commerce player in the U.S., as measured by GMV.
Shopify offers a scalable, end-to-end commerce platform that serves merchants of all sizes, including offline, international, and B2B businesses. Its aggregate scale, innovation, and ecosystem of partners enable merchants to take payments, receive loans, and sell products internationally. Shopify's access to real-time, transaction-level data across a broad merchant base strengthens its competitive position and allows it to share the benefits of scale directly with its customers. With less than 2% share of $20 trillion in global commerce, it has a long runway for growth.

MercadoLibre, Inc. (MELI) is the largest e-commerce company in Latin America. The company operates the MercadoLibre e-commerce marketplace, the Mercado Pago fintech platform, and the Mercado Envios suite of shipping solutions for sellers on its platform.
MercadoLibre benefits from the emergence of two secular trends: e-commerce and digital payments. The company has a significant first-mover advantage and is investing aggressively in logistics to widen its competitive moat. Latin America is a predominantly cash-based economy with e-commerce penetration under 20%, and MercadoLibre has an attractive, asset-light marketplace business model. We believe its logistics network is a key competitive advantage, and we see a significant opportunity in the growth of its fintech offerings.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSM), known as TSMC, is the world's largest independent semiconductor foundry, manufacturing chips on behalf of other companies.
TSMC is the dominant force in leading-edge semiconductor foundry manufacturing, as it benefits from economies of scale and a superior cost structure. Its successful track record of deploying new technology faster than competitors helps it maintain market share and pricing power. We believe TSMC’s investments in advanced nodes will strengthen its market leadership and support long-term profitability.

Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) offers enhanced security and performance for websites, apps, and SaaS. Its network spans over 100 countries and connects with over 10,000 ISPs, cloud providers, SaaS providers, and enterprises. Its edge network operates within 100 milliseconds of 99% of the developed world.
Cloudflare's technology is 30% to 50% cheaper than that of peers, while its gross margins are 1,000 to 2,000 basis points higher. It is widely respected among developers, who migrate it from personal to enterprise use. These advantages allow Cloudflare to service about 25% of global internet traffic. We believe Cloudflare will maintain 25%-plus growth for several years given its unique technology and go-to-market strategy that is disrupting a $40 billion market, along with the potential to attack a nascent Edge Computing market that could grow to $10 billion in four years.

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.

Snowflake Inc. (SNOW) provides a cloud-native data platform with use cases spanning data analytics, data sharing, and, more recently, AI and data science workloads. It enables storage and computation across leading public cloud providers and supports simpler, cheaper deployments with high concurrency usage.
Snowflake is leveraging its cloud-native architecture to deliver affordable, scalable, secure, and easy-to-use functionality that is lacking in many competing solutions. Its early-mover advantage, broad vision, strong brand, growing system, and talented management should enable growth within a large addressable market. In addition, we expect Snowflake’s new CEO and product launches to allow the company to better address growing data needs across generative AI workloads. Snowflake's unique marketplace and data sharing offerings should also accelerate usage among customers.

Intuitive Surgical, Inc. (ISRG) manufactures and markets the da Vinci Surgical System, a robotic surgical system used for minimally invasive surgical procedures.
We believe a large number of medical procedures that are currently performed using open surgery will eventually be performed using Intuitive’s da Vinci system. Robotic surgery is less invasive than open surgery, and patients experience less blood loss, less nerve damage, reduced pain, and faster recovery. Intuitive generates a large and expanding portion of its revenue from recurring procedures. We expect revenue and earnings to grow at attractive rates as procedure volumes increase.