After a rocky start to the year, the tech-heavy NASDAQ has staged a remarkable comeback – 35% since its April low. This powerful rebound highlights both the enduring strength of the tech sector and its ongoing allure for investors.
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Among those keeping a close watch on these trends is Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, a widely recognized tech expert, who sees even more upside ahead and lays out his case for why the sector’s rally could be far from over.
“We believe tech stocks will have a very strong second half of the year with the AI Revolution tailwinds now accelerating across semis, software, and the enterprise and consumer landscape,” Ives opined. “Our bullish view is that investors are still underestimating the tidal wave of growth on the horizon from the $2 trillion of spending over the next 3 years coming from enterprise and government spending around AI technology and use cases.”
“In our opinion,” Ives added, “after a relatively strong few months navigating tariff and geopolitical storms, now tech stocks are poised to see another 10%+ move higher in the second half of 2025 led by the tech winners in this ‘golden age’ for the tech world.”
Backing up his confidence, Ives highlights three tech stocks that he believes are primed to ride this next wave higher.
In fact, he’s not the only one singing the praises of these stocks. According to the TipRanks database, they are all rated as ‘Strong Buys’ by the analyst consensus. Let’s take a closer look.
Progress Software (PRGS)
The first of Ives’ picks that we’ll look at here is Progress Software, which has been around since 1981 and has built itself around an essential need in the business world: designing and deploying software applications. Specifically, Progress offers its customers a wide range of tools designed to make business tech teams more productive. Progress’s own products allow users to create high-end apps based on the latest developments in the digital world.
This company has been trying to ride the AI wave that has been crashing ashore in recent years. The company’s product line includes several applications and tools built around AI capabilities, and in recent weeks, the company has made important moves to expand and improve its AI offerings.
On June 25, Progress released the latest iteration of its Semaphore platform, an AI-powered metadata management tool. This latest release of a popular product includes enhancements and new features purpose-built to speed the delivery of data-driven insights, a vital capability in an increasingly AI-centered business software landscape.
And in a merger announcement, Progress made it public on June 30 that it had signed and closed on its acquisition of the agentic AI firm Nuclia. Nuclia specializes in agentic AI retrieval-augmented generation solutions, or RAG solutions, and this product, currently delivered by Nuclia via the popular as-a-service model, is now part of Progress’s product portfolio. RAG tools allow organizations to use their proprietary business data and information as the source material for delivering accurate answers with generative AI.
Progress last released earnings results for its fiscal 2Q25, the quarter ending on May 31 this year. The company’s top line of $237.36 million was up an impressive 36% year-over-year and met the analyst forecasts. At the bottom line, the company’s non-GAAP EPS of $1.40 was up from $1.09 one year ago and beat expectations by 10 cents per share. Nevertheless, despite these positive results, shares in the company slipped after the earnings release, falling as much as 15%, with investors seemingly concerned about declining margins and sluggish quarter-over-quarter ARR growth.
For his part, Ives was not worried about the company’s earnings results. The analyst is impressed by this software firm’s continuing moves into the forefront of AI technology, and writes, “PRGS continues to invest strategically into agentic and AI capabilities in its own products while integrating AI into operational workflows to generate greater efficiencies and improved cost management initiatives… We continue to believe that PRGS represents an underappreciated 3rd derivative AI name as the company ramps its AI strategy through its accretive M&A engine while driving cost efficiencies across operations by leveraging AI to drive profitable growth over the coming quarters.”
Ives follows these comments with an Outperform (i.e., Buy) rating on PRGS shares, and his price target, now set at $75, implies a one-year gain of 38% for the stock. (To watch Ives’s track record, click here)
There are only 4 recent analyst reviews on file for this stock, and their 3-to-1 split in favor of Buy over Hold gives Progress its Strong Buy consensus rating. The stock is currently priced at $54.45, and its $72.55 average price target points toward an upside potential of 33% in the next 12 months. (See PRGS stock forecast)
OneStream (OS)
Next on our list of Ives-backed tech stocks is OneStream, the Michigan-based financial tech company that has created a niche providing cloud-based AI tools in the world of online finance. The company is designed to bring the power of AI to bear on the data management needs of modern finance, to modernize the CFO’s office, and to boost productivity through a more efficient decision-making process.
That’s a bold claim to stake in the fast-paced, high-stakes financial world. OneStream recognizes that challenges facing modern financial companies have consequences, and costs, measured in the millions of dollars. It meets those challenges with an array of tools, providing solutions for the day-to-day needs of financial companies – data analytics, integration, and quality; planning and closing cycles; forecasting and reporting. OneStream’s AI tools can handle all of this, and more.
In May of this year, OneStream announced a set of improvements and platform enhancements to its productivity tools, including the Version 9 release of the OneStream platform as well as a BI Connector with Microsoft Fabric. Specific productivity tools include Allocations, designed to build and manage allocation models with no coding required; Analytic Drill-Downs, to improve real-time variance analysis; and Admin Assist, providing more than 35 reports and utilities, so that administrators can focus on their higher-level, higher-value work.
Also in May of this year, OneStream unveiled four new tools in its SensibleAI platform. These new tools – SensibleAI Agents, SensibleAI Studio, SensibleAI Account Reconciliations, and the most advanced SensibleAI Forecast – are infused across OneStream’s processes and are designed to help financial officers “navigate uncertainty, identify risks sooner, run what-if scenarios, and uncover more insights,” all to drive a faster and more accurate decision process.
Turning to the company’s financial results, we find that OneStream’s 1Q25 release showed a top line of $136.3 million. This was up 24% year-over-year and beat the forecast by more than $5 million. The firm’s bottom-line earnings, reported as a non-GAAP EPS of 4 cents per share, were 7 cents per share better than expected. The company expects to see a full-year 2025 non-GAAP EPS in the range between 5 cents and 13 cents, based on full-year revenue between $583 million and $587 million.
Daniel Ives, in his write-up of OS for Wedbush, noted the revenue and earnings guidance as a positive and went on to explain why this company is well-positioned for continued gains: “The company reaffirmed its FY25 revenue guidance while raising its bottom-line guidance as OS looks to capitalize on modernizing legacy financial systems and assisting CFOs with transforming the financial departments despite noting customer scrutiny due to the macro backdrop… OS looks to drive efficiencies and manage the business thoughtfully during this uncertain macro. With the company launching new innovations to meet elevated customer demand, we believe OS is in the early innings of its growth story of modernizing the CFO office and providing a unified view of corporate financial data to provide greater business visibility, agility and predictability in this uncertain macro backdrop.”
Ives rates OneStream’s shares as Outperform (i.e., Buy), and has set his price target at $35, implying that the stock will appreciate by 31% in the year ahead.
For the Street as a whole, OneStream is a Strong Buy, a consensus based on 18 reviews that include 17 Buys and 1 Hold. The shares have a current trading price of $26.66 and an average target price of $31.60, together suggesting a one-year upside of 18.5%. (See OS stock forecast)
Rubrik, Inc. (RBRK)
We’ll wrap up our list of Dan Ives’s picks with Rubrik, a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity company with a focus on cloud data management and data security systems. These are vital applications in today’s digital environment, given the expansion of large-scale data centers and the related booms in AI and cloud computing. Rubrik’s products are designed to secure the world’s data, in all of its various locations: enterprise databases, cloud systems, SaaS. The company aims to give business clients the security and resilience they need to stand firm against cyberattacks, malicious insiders, and operational disruptions.
Cybersecurity is essential these days, and some numbers show that tale. Rubrik notes that 90% of businesses were hit with some form of cyberattack at least once last year, and that almost 20% had to deal with more than 25 ransomware attacks. That’s a hefty threat environment, and Rubrik provides a set of strong tools for data protection, data threat analytics, data security posture management, and cyber recovery – in short, everything an enterprise-scale customer will need to keep data safe, secure, and available.
The next ‘big thing’ in AI subscription software is shaping up to be agentic AI, and Rubrik has recently made a move to incorporate this new tech into its product offerings. Last month, Rubrik announced it had entered into an agreement to acquire Predibase, a developer platform for the production and distribution of open-source AI. Predibase’s bent toward open-source makes its AI systems, including agentic AI, adaptable to any user platform and highly cost-effective. The companies did not disclose the terms of the upcoming transaction.
In its fiscal 1Q26 release (April quarter), the last period reported, Rubrik’s results beat the forecasts across the board. The company’s quarterly revenue came to $278.5 million, up 49% year-over-year and $18 million better than had been anticipated. At the bottom line, Rubrik realized an EPS loss of 15 cents per share; this was 17 cents per share better than had been forecast. For the full-year fiscal 2026, Rubrik expects to bring in between $1.179 billion and $1.189 billion in revenue, and to achieve a subscription ARR between $1.38 billion and $1.388 billion.
Checking in one last time with Dan Ives, we find the analyst upbeat on Rubrik’s ongoing gains. He writes of the company, “RBRK continues to gain momentum with larger deals across new and existing customers… The company raised its FY26 guidance across the board as RBRK continues to capitalize on elevated demand for cyber resilience and recovery solutions which remains a priority for CIOs and CISOs with more organizations forced to prepare for worst-case scenarios on the cyber front.”
These comments support Ives’s Outperform (i.e., Buy) rating here, while his $120 price target implies that RBRK shares will see an upside of 35% on the one-year horizon.
Rubrik has earned a Strong Buy consensus rating from the Street’s analysts, based on 19 reviews with a breakdown of 16 Buys to 3 Holds. The shares have a selling price of $89.08 and an average target price of $112.31, giving them a 26% upside potential by this time next year. (See RBRK stock forecast)
To find good ideas for stocks trading at attractive valuations, visit TipRanks’ Best Stocks to Buy, a tool that unites all of TipRanks’ equity insights.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the featured analysts. The content is intended to be used for informational purposes only. It is very important to do your own analysis before making any investment.
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