Soumya Eswaran
4 min read
In This Article:
Baron Funds, an investment management company, released its “Baron Small Cap Fund” first-quarter 2025 investor letter. A copy of the letter can be downloaded here. In the first quarter of 2025, the fund was down 9.07% (Institutional Shares) compared to the Russell 2000 Growth Index’s (the Index) -11.12% return. Small-cap stocks continued to underperform larger market caps meaningfully, so the Fund lagged the Russell 3000 Index, which fell 4.72% in the quarter. In addition, please check the fund’s top five holdings to know its best picks in 2025.
In its first-quarter 2025 investor letter, Baron Small Cap Fund highlighted stocks such as PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE:PAR). PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE:PAR) offers omnichannel cloud-based hardware and software solutions to the restaurant and retail industries. The one-month return of PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE:PAR) was 10.27%, and its shares gained 36.43% of their value over the last 52 weeks. On May 23, 2025, PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE:PAR) stock closed at $65.95 per share with a market capitalization of $2.671 billion.
Baron Small Cap Fund stated the following regarding PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE:PAR) in its Q1 2025 investor letter:
"We purchased shares of PAR Technology Corporation (NYSE:PAR), a leading software, hardware, and service provider to the foodservice industry. PAR is building an all-in-one software and service platform for enterprise restaurants and convenience stores to run the most critical portions of their technology stacks. Historically, the company was known as a hardware supplier to large QSR restaurant chains, but since CEO Savneet Singh took the role in late 2018, he has made software the primary focus of the business through organic investment and M&A. The company has added several complementary software pieces around its core point-of-sale software product (less than $10 million in software revenue when Savneet took over) to build a unified technology platform offering integrated solutions and data insights supporting $275 million in ARR today growing 20% or more annually.
