Contrary Research Rundown #86
The latest from Foundations & Frontiers on the cutting edge of mining, plus new memos on Addepar, Sentry, and more
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Research Rundown
You’re obviously receiving this newsletter because you’re a Contrary Research subscriber. But what you may not know is that Contrary also runs another publication, called Foundations & Frontiers. Where Contrary Research focuses on breaking down specific private tech companies and markets, Foundations & Frontiers (F&F) unpacks broad areas of technology. In a recent piece, Anna-Sofia Lesiv, the author of F&F, dives into the technology at the cutting edge of mining. Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
A new era of mining is upon us. The global push toward electrification is changing more than just the cars we drive and the way our electric grids are configured. It is re-orienting the global economy around a new set of commodities critical to building the electric storage and essential components that will drive the electric economy.
Those commodities, also known as critical minerals, will be to the twenty-first century what fossil fuels were to the twentieth: a resource that plays a major role in global trade and geopolitics. This is why commentators like Teddy Feldman, a writer who covers contemporary mining, are calling critical minerals the “new oil”.
If minerals are the new oil, then their production will become an increasing economic and geopolitical priority. However, the US is not producing nearly enough of them to meet the lofty electrification goals it has committed to, and has become reliant on foreign countries like China to supply the gap. In 2023, the United States was import-reliant for 95 percent of rare earth minerals, essential for batteries and electric motors.
Although stores of critical minerals are actually abundant in the United States, there are only a handful of operational mines in the US. Meanwhile, proposed mines are finding it nearly impossible to compete on price with the abundant and cheap supply of materials flooding the market from China.
This puts the United States in a kind of Catch-22, which only innovation or firm government action may be able to resolve. However, such efforts will take years to fully implement, which only makes greater attention and directed technological progress toward prospecting, extracting, and processing critical minerals all the more urgent.
To read the full piece, check out The New Era of Mining here.
Addepar is a cloud-based investment management platform designed to help wealth managers for UHNW individuals. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Manager, Software Engineering - Navigator - New York, NY
Portfolio Data Analyst - Portfolio Data - Salt Lake City, UT
Sentry is an open-source error-tracking platform that provides software tools to minimize the time and effort it takes to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues in software applications. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Software Engineer, Applications - San Francisco, CA
Engineering Manager, Developer Experience - San Francisco, CA
Check out some standout roles from this week.
StarTree | U.S. Remote - Software Engineer, Platform
Abridge | U.S. Remote - Staff Software Engineer (Full Stack), Staff Machine Learning Systems Engineer
Cribl | U.S. Remote - Principal Software Engineer, Backend, Technical Support Engineer
Hugging Face recently announced the launch of ZeroGPU, “a shared infrastructure for indie and academic AI builders to run AI demos without the financial burden of compute costs.”
A leaked report from Plaid investor Altimeter indicated that the company had $280 million of revenue, while burning $70 million a year, and had $180 million of cash.
OpenAI recently reported it had reached 100 million users worldwide across its various products.
Speaking of OpenAI, the company’s co-founder, Ilya Sutskever, announced that he would be departing the company.
OpenAI competitor, Anthropic, continues to build out its management team with the addition of Mike Krieger as Chief Product Officer. Krieger was previously the co-founder and CTO of Instagram.
Eoghan McCabe, the CEO of Intercom, shared that the company intends to spend $100 million on its AI tool, Fin X. This investment, in large part, is possible because the company has reached profitability.
Stability AI’s woes continue, with the news breaking that the company only generated $5 million in revenue in Q1 2024, while burning $30 million (not to mention owing cloud providers $100 million.
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