The tech sector is home to a lot of millionaire-maker stocks. Stocks like Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) all delivered big multibagger gains for their patient long-term investors who tuned out the near-term noise.
But hindsight is always 20/20, and it's tough to find the next tech stock that will deliver millionaire-making gains over the next few decades. To narrow down that list of potential millionaire-makers, we should focus on smaller companies that are still growing rapidly, have a defensible niche, and have a clear roadmap for scaling up their business.
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Let's take a look at three companies that check those boxes: IonQ (IONQ 0.72%), DigitalOcean (DOCN -0.62%), and Innodata (INOD -1.38%). All three of these stocks are still speculative growth plays, but they might be potential millionaire-makers in the future.
IonQ
IonQ is a quantum computing company that builds full systems and provides cloud-based services. It develops its own QPUs with its proprietary "trapped ion" technology, which enables it to detect more errors and maintain a quantum state for a longer time than older types of QPUs. Unlike traditional binary computers, which store data separately in zeros and ones, quantum computers can store zeros and ones simultaneously to process data at much faster rates.
IonQ sells three quantum computing systems: its older Aria system, its flagship Forte system, and its data center-oriented Forte Enterprise system. It will launch its fourth system, the Tempo, later this year. Its total quantum computing power, which it measures in algorithmic qubits (AQ), reached 36 AQ at the end of 2024. But it expects that figure to reach 64 AQ in 2025, 256 AQ in 2026, 384 AQ in 2027, and 1,024 AQ in 2028. To achieve that rapid expansion, it plans to deploy more systems, shrink down its QPUs with its trapped ion process, and improve its error detection process.
From 2024 to 2027, analysts expect IonQ's revenue to grow at a CAGR of 88%. With a market cap of $11.8 billion, its stock might seem incredibly pricey at more than 40 times its 2027 revenue -- but it could justify that premium valuation as the quantum computing market expands. If that happens, IonQ might be a millionaire-maker.
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure services provider that rents out small "droplets" of its servers and remote GPUs for AI applications. That makes it an attractive choice for smaller businesses or developers that don't need an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure platform like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure.
From 2020 to 2024, DigitalOcean's revenue grew at a CAGR of 25%. It also turned profitable in 2023 and more than quadrupled its net income in 2024. From 2024 to 2027, analysts expect its revenue and net income to rise at a CAGR of 14% and 29%, respectively.
The company expects that growth to be driven by its new application layers for generative AI applications, the expansion of its AI-ready infrastructure, and its pursuit of larger "scalers" (its customers that generate at least $100,000 in annual recurring revenue). With a market cap of $2.7 billion, DigitalOcean is still tiny compared to the top cloud infrastructure giants -- and it still looks like a bargain at 2 times this year's sales and 29 times forward earnings.
DigitalOcean might face tougher competition if AWS and Azure start targeting smaller businesses, but it could also maintain its early mover's advantage in its niche. If this underdog keeps growing, it might just generate millionaire-making gains over the next decade.
Innodata
Innodata was once a tiny, slow-growth analytics software maker. But in 2018, it rolled out a suite of microservices that prepare large amounts of data for AI applications. The market's demand for those microservices, which drastically shorten the time for developing new AI applications, exploded over the following years as the market expanded.
Today, five of the "Magnificent Seven" companies use Innodata to clean up and prepare their AI-oriented data. From 2018 to 2024, its revenue grew at a CAGR of 20% and its net income rose at a CAGR of 54%. From 2024 to 2027, analysts expect its revenue and net income to grow at a CAGR of 22% and 16%, respectively, as AI apps consume even more data. Innodata's stock has nearly tripled over the past 12 months, yet it still doesn't look that pricey at five times next year's sales and 50 times next year's earnings.
With a market cap of $1.6 billion, Innodata could still have plenty of room to grow and attract some takeover interest from bigger tech companies. Over the long term, it could keep expanding its ecosystem with more end-to-end data collection, analytics, and AI annotation services to become a "one-stop shop" for managing large amounts of AI data. All of those catalysts could drive Innodata's evolution into a millionaire-making tech stock over the next decade.
