Contrary Research Rundown #91
Contrary Research's new look, plus new memos on Celonis, OneSchema, and more
We launched Contrary Research back in September 2022. At the time, we knew there was demand for private market insights, but even we didn’t appreciate just how much demand there was.
Contrary Research resonated with founders, investors, operators, journalists, limited partners, and general fans of technology all because private market companies are notoriously difficult to unpack.
Since then we’ve grown Contrary Research to over 50K subscribers and have covered hundreds of companies like Anduril, Ramp, Figma, Stripe, and Rippling.
But as our brand has grown, we’ve continued to pay attention to the needs of our users. What are people trying to accomplish when they come to Contrary Research?
We dug in to better understand the most important aspects of the user experience for consumers of private market research we should build around. As a result, we’re pleased to announce an update to the Contrary Research website!
You can read all about it here, and be sure to check out the new look!
Celonis offers a process mining and intelligence platform that supports businesses in identifying operational inefficiencies and developing strategies for optimization via visualization, data-driven analysis, and monitoring of existing systems. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Platform Engineer - New York, NY
Full Stack Software Engineer - Los Angeles, CA
OneSchema is an embeddable spreadsheet importer and validator that can automate the process of moving CSV files with up to 20 million rows, while also validating the data to ensure that formatting is correct and the data is complete. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Sales Engineer - San Francisco, CA
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Rize | San Francisco, CA - Founding Software Engineer, Full-Stack Product, Founding Software Engineer, Durable Workflow Engine
Dual Entry | Remote, New York - Backend Engineer (Integrations), Senior Backend Engineer (Founding Engineer), Senior Backend Engineer (Remote)
The gap between Databricks and Snowflake is shrinking, fast. Databricks is on pace to overtake Snowflake in ARR by Q3 2026. Databricks is expecting to cross $2.4 billion in revenue run-rate growing ~65% YoY by H1’25 (Jan FYE) while Snowflakes expects to have $3.2 billion in revenue while only growing ~26% YoY during the same time period. Databrick’s growth is driven by a successful multi-product strategy that includes significant traction in AI — a rarity among software companies outside of major hyperscalers.
Cerebras, a startup challenging NVIDIA in AI chips, has filed confidentially for an IPO, signaling its plans to go public and compete more aggressively against the industry leader.
Character.AI has developed techniques to reduce the memory footprint of their LLMs by over 20X, allowing them to serve over 20,000 inference queries per second — roughly 20% of the volume handled by Google Search.
Plaid has introduced a new platform called “Layer” that enables a fast, secure, and customizable onboarding experience by leveraging Plaid's network of consumer-permissioned financial data to streamline identity verification and bank account linking.
Color Health has developed an AI assistant using OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to help doctors screen and treat cancer patients. “In the future, AI's ability to ingest and analyze vast amounts of clinical and real-world data can help doctors more quickly find clues for even asymptomatic cancer.” Although, admittedly, the technology isn’t there (yet).
China's AI chatbot market is exploding and experiencing a price war. Although it may stagnate innovation in the industry, it shines a light on the market more broadly which many experts believed was “a decade behind” the American cutting edge. Benchmark’s Bill Gurley disagrees, and tweeted that China isn’t “years behind” the US in terms of LLM capability.
Dell is expanding its AI Factory with NVIDIA to offer new servers, edge solutions, and services that speed up AI adoption and innovation for organizations.
OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced a new AI startup focused on safely developing “superintelligence” that he co-founded with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy. The new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. — SSI for short — has the sole purpose of creating a safe AI model that is more intelligent than humans.
Perplexity, the startup taking on Google search, is accused of scraping and fabricating content. The company has raised from investors like Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, Balaji, Bessemer, Naval and others, but some journalists say it’s still “unclear what the startup actually is.”
Speaking of AI-powered search engines, Genspark is a platform that uses generative AI to write custom summaries in response to search queries.
The Senate voted nearly unanimously to pass a bill that aims to make it easier for the U.S. to compete with China and Russia in the global race to build new nuclear reactors, at home and in emerging markets like Ghana, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.
Redpoint released their InfraRed 100 list which includes 100 transformative companies in cloud infrastructure. These companies are highlighted for being on the cutting edge for reliability, scalability, and security. The list includes companies like Anthropic, Arctic Wolf, Databricks, Fivetran, Hugging Face, Linear, Pinecone, and Scale AI.
This past week, Nvidia surpassed Microsoft as world's most valuable company at a market cap over $3.3 trillion.
Zapier has launched a new Chrome extension that allows you to work side-by-side with AI bots to complete tasks across 6,000+ apps, summarize webpage content, and boost productivity.
Webflow's co-founder Vlad Magdalin is stepping down as CEO to become the Chief Innovation Officer, passing the CEO role to Linda Tong, the company's COO and President for the last two years.
SpaceX is rolling out backpack-sized satellite internet antenna called Starlink Mini for $599. Elon tweeted “This product will change the world” and it only took him 5 minutes to set it up and send that tweet.
OpenAI is considering becoming a “for-profit benefit corporation" like Anthropic and xAI, which could open the door to an eventual IPO and allow CEO Sam Altman to take a stake in the $86 billion company.
Forerunner, an SF-based consumer-focused VC firm, published a research report on the performance of consumer vs. enterprise startups. According to the report, consumer startups are as likely to go public as enterprise startups, demand >10x multiples at IPO and are more likely to surpass the Rule of 40 than their enterprise counterparts.
Bilt's credit card deal with Wells Fargo is costing the bank hundreds of millions of dollars, as the economics don't align with the bank’s initial assumptions. “Wells assumed that it would be a top of wallet card for renters who carry balances. Instead, a lot of savvy consumers (myself included) use the bank for the minimum required to collect the rental points. Wells assumed that 65% of card-purchase volume would be non-rent, generating interchange-fee revenue. The reality is inverted... most of the volume is rent payments on which they don't earn much.”
A recent Washington Post piece accused Scale AI of exploiting 2 million people in the Philippines for the data annotation work it does, with workers facing delayed, reduced or canceled payments despite completing tasks.
Matt Turck, investor and Partner at FirstMark Capital, sat down with Aaron Katz, the CEO of Clickhouse, a company that offers a real-time data processing warehouse for companies like Netflix, Uber and Spotify on his podcast, the Mad Podcast.
At Contrary Research, our vision is to become the best starting place to understand private tech companies. We can't do it alone, nor would we want to. We focus on bringing together a variety of different perspectives.
That's why we're opening applications for our Research Fellowship. In the past, we've worked with software engineers, product managers, investors, and more. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech companies, apply here!