Growth investing requires you to place your money in promising businesses with great long-term potential. You need to pick out companies with proven track records, sustainable tailwinds, and competent management teams.

These stocks should see their share prices rise steadily over time, netting you significant capital gains to help you achieve your retirement dreams. You just need the patience to see your investments grow over the years or even decades.

The technology and software-as-a-service sectors are great places to start looking for businesses that can grow their top and bottom lines and free cash flow. Some of these stocks might be beaten down in the short term due to unmet expectations, making them enticing buys if you can hold through the volatility.

Here are three software companies that I believe could see their share prices soar as they continue to grow.

1. Snowflake

Snowflake (NYSE: SNOW) has a software-as-a-service platform that allows organizations to collate disparate data sets to perform data analytics. The company saw its shares plunge sharply when it released a weak sales outlook for fiscal 2025 and announced the retirement of its CEO, Frank Slootman, who was replaced by Sridhar Ramaswamy, a veteran executive at Alphabet‘s Google.

Investors should look past this dip and be impressed by Snowflake’s steady growth over the years. Revenue more than doubled from $1.2 billion in fiscal 2022 to $2.8 billion in fiscal 2024.

Gross profit did even better, rising from $760.9 million to $1.9 billion over the same period, while its gross margin went up from 62.4% to 68%. Free cash flow improved dramatically over these three years, going from $81.1 million in fiscal 2022 to $778.9 million in fiscal 2024.

The numbers continued to impress for the first half of the current fiscal year. Revenue rose 30.8% year over year to $1.7 billion, while gross profit improved by 30.7% to $1.1 billion. Free cash flow of $390.4 million was up around 11% from a year ago.

The software company’s remaining performance obligations (RPO) climbed by 47% year over year to $5.2 billion, signaling healthy top-line growth in the year ahead. The total customer count jumped 47.8% year over year to 5,231 in the second quarter of 2025, while customers that contributed more than $1 million in product revenue went from 399 to 510 over the same period.

Management believes that its total addressable market of $152 billion as of 2023 will more than double to $342 billion by 2028. This large market size will provide ample opportunities for Snowflake to continue its impressive growth in revenue and free cash flow.

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Although its shares have slumped by 40% year to date, they are trading at one of their cheapest price-to-sales ratios at just 11.1, offering a great bargain to investors who have the patience and tenacity to wait for the market to recognize the quality of the business.

2. Salesforce

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) uses artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver customer relationship management (CRM) analytics, tools, and insights on its platform. The company’s share price has stayed almost flat year to date even as its business continues to improve.

Total revenue climbed from $26.5 billion in fiscal 2022 to $34.9 billion in fiscal 2024. Operating income surged nearly tenfold from $548 million to $5 billion over the same period, while net income nearly tripled from $1.4 billion to $4.1 billion, and free cash flow climbed from $5.3 billion to $9.5 billion.

The company continued its earnings momentum in the first half of the current fiscal year. Revenue rose 9.5% year over year to $18.5 billion, while operating income increased 85% to $3.5 billion. Net income doubled year over year to $3 billion. Free cash flow of $6.8 billion was up 40% year over year.

Salesforce also announced a quarterly dividend of $0.40 per share for an annualized dividend of $1.60. Management projects that its total addressable market will grow 13% annually from 2022 to 2026, reaching $290 billion, giving it ample opportunities to expand its market share.

Earlier this month, the company acquired Own Company, a provider of data protection and management solutions, for approximately $1.9 billion. This purchase is aimed at enhancing the security and availability of customers’ data.

Salesforce also unveiled Agentforce, a suite of autonomous AI agents intended to help employees handle mundane tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce. The aim is to help customers improve efficiency with the AI agents analyzing data, making decisions, and optimizing marketing campaigns. These software enhancements should improve customer stickiness and ensure that Salesforce can continue to improve the number of its customers and their spending.

3. UiPath

UiPath (NYSE: PATH) isn’t your typical AI company, but it still helps numerous organizations to work more collaboratively. Its platform provides robotic process automation (RPA) to automate repetitive employee tasks.

Shares were pummeled this year after CEO Rob Enslin resigned abruptly and Daniel Dines was reappointed as the CEO. Because of this corporate shake-up, shares of the RPA company have dropped nearly 50% year to date.

Nonetheless, the business has grown steadily. From fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2024, revenue increased from $892.3 million to $1.3 billion while gross profit increased from $723.4 million to $1.1 billion. The first two of those three fiscal years saw negative free cash flow, but in fiscal 2024, free cash flow turned positive at $291.7 million.

In the first half of fiscal 2025, revenue and free cash flow continued to trend upward. Revenue climbed nearly 13% year over year to $651.4 million with gross profit at $532.8 million, up 10% year over year. Free cash flow rose 32% year over year to $143.8 million. The company recently unveiled new platform features that incorporate generative AI. UiPath Autopilot is meant to help software developers while making tests of that software easier and quicker. These enhancements, along with numerous other features incorporated into the company’s platform, should increase customer loyalty while attracting new clients. As proof, customers with more than $100,000 in annual recurring revenue jumped from 1,930 to 2,163 for its latest quarter.

During UiPath’s 2022 Investor Day, management projected a total addressable market of $93.2 billion. Investors should feel confident about the business’ potential and the chances of better days ahead.

Should you invest $1,000 in Salesforce right now?

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Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Royston Yang has positions in Alphabet. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Salesforce, Snowflake, and UiPath. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

3 Growth Stocks That Could Skyrocket in 2024 and Beyond was originally published by The Motley Fool