It's been a good week on Wall Street, with major market benchmarks recovering sharply from their losses year to date. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC -2.05%) was up another 1% as of 12:30 p.m. ET, bringing its weekly gains to more than 7%.
Big-name Nasdaq stocks get a ton of attention, but often, the smaller companies are the ones whose stocks have a lot more room to run higher. On Friday, double-digit percentage gains came for Embark Technology (EMBK) and Duolingo (DUOL -2.39%), and both recently public companies could see their share prices run a lot further in the weeks and months ahead if all goes well. Let's take a closer look.
Embark drives forward
Shares of Embark Technology were higher by more than 12% early Friday afternoon. The autonomous commercial trucking technology specialist just went public in November, and it reported its financial results for the end of 2021.
With Embark not yet having any products to offer, its financial numbers weren't pretty. Embark didn't report any revenue, and operating losses ballooned almost tenfold to $65 million for the quarter. That brought total losses for 2021 to nearly $104 million.
However, Embark did make significant progress in moving its business forward. The company now has 14,200 reservations for autonomous trucks under its partner development program, and it has built up partnerships with key companies like truck engine manufacturer Cummins (CMI -1.32%) and semiconductor giant Nvidia (NVDA -10.01%).
Even more importantly, Embark expects to deliver its first technology-equipped trucks to Knight-Swift Transportation (KNX 0.54%) by the end of 2022. That has investors excited about the autonomous trucking concept more broadly. With ongoing expansion and testing with the goal to deploy more extensive fleets around 2024, Embark is finally getting some attention from investors interested in autonomous vehicle technology.
Image source: Getty Images.
Can Duolingo translate into big gains?
Elsewhere, shares of Duolingo were up about 11%. The global language-education specialist has seen its stock fall sharply since its July 2021 initial public offering (IPO), but investors are now starting to get more confident about its prospects to rebound.
2021 was a strong year for Duolingo from a fundamental business standpoint. Although the program is available for free on an ad-supported basis, the language specialist said that its paid subscriber base jumped to more than 2.5 million in 2021, up by 56% from 2020 levels. With more than 40 million people using the platform every month, Duolingo has done a good job of generating organic growth through word of mouth rather than expensive marketing campaigns.
Like many new IPO stocks, Duolingo isn't seen as becoming profitable very quickly. It'll take a larger paid subscriber base to generate the revenue necessary to reach that milestone. Yet Duolingo has barely tapped some major markets around the world, with considerable prospects in highly populous nations like India.
Duolingo believes that more than 1.8 billion people across the globe are looking to learn foreign languages. It's already tapping into a considerable portion of that addressable market, but it believes that it has a lot more room to capture the full potential in the $60 billion language-education market. Investors appear more confident of Duolingo's prospects Friday, and as growth stocks generally look to try to recover from recent losses, shareholders will want to see further momentum to the upside for the stock.