It’s been another lackluster year for many small-cap stocks while America’s tech giants worth trillions of dollars continue to balloon in value. The Russell 2000 index tracking small caps only recently clawed all the way back from its 2022 bear market to surpass its 2021 record high, left in the dust by the S&P 500’s 40% growth in the same span. The Russell 2000’s 9% gain so far this year trails large caps by five percentage points.
But the AI craze that has lifted well-known names like Nvidia, Google and Oracle has filtered down to some smaller companies. Forbes’ annual list of America’s Most Successful Small-Cap Companies is filled with lesser known industrial power providers, data center infrastructure firms and semiconductors stocks that have all multiplied thanks to AI.
“Particularly in the small-cap space, where you have less research coverage, the potential that something could be misunderstood or underestimated only goes up,” says Ken Farsalas, portfolio manager of the Oberweis Small-Cap Opportunities Fund. “People that do their homework can still make money, even in an environment that’s dominated by the Magnificent Seven.”
To compile the list, Forbes used data from FactSet to find 621 companies with a market value between $300 million and $5 billion that also had positive sales growth over the past 12 months and a share price of at least $5. Financial institutions, REITs, utilities, royalty trusts and limited partnerships were excluded, as were companies that have been public for less than one year. The top 100 stocks were ranked based on earnings growth, sales growth, return on equity and total stock return for the last five years available, with more weight given to the last 12 months of data. All data is as of October 31, 2025.