13 Most Profitable Software Stocks to Buy Now

10. Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS)

Net Income (TTM): $1.06 billion

Number of Hedge Fund holdings: 69

On February 10, Vivek Arya, an analyst at Bank of America Securities, reaffirmed a Buy rating on Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS), while setting a price target of $400. This translates to an upside potential of approximately 34%.

On the same day, Reuters reported that Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS) launched a virtual artificial intelligence “agent” to assist giants simplify the process of designing computer chips. The unveiled technology aims to provide up to 10 times productivity enhancements for coding designs and testbenches, creation of test plans, and automation of issue resolution.

According to Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS), the product is the “world’s first agentic workflow for automating chip design and verification,” with the system not only orchestrating multiple virtual engineers, but also employing the company’s core electronic design automation (EDA) tools. What’s interesting is that many leading semiconductor companies are already utilizing the advanced technology. As senior director of engineering at Altera, Arvind Vidyarthi says that the system “significantly reduced our verification effort in some areas by approximately 10X.”

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CDNS) is a California-based provider of software, hardware, and other services. The company’s core offerings include functional verification services, a formal verification platform, a parallel logic simulation platform, an enterprise emulation platform, and a prototyping platform for chip verification.