Contrary Research Rundown #124

The US is going supersonic. Plus, memos on Boom Supersonic, Lighmatter, and more.

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Research Rundown

About a month ago on January 28, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, in a historic moment, became the first civil aircraft to go supersonic over the continental United States in history. The successful test also made Boom the first private company to successfully conduct a civil supersonic jet flight. The famous Concorde program, which began commercial operation in 1969 and operated for nearly three decades before shutting down permanently in 2003, was not a private program, but rather a joint project between the governments of France and Great Britain.

The XB-1 flew up to an altitude of 35 thousand feet before accelerating to Mach 1.1, or about 750 miles per hour — officially breaking the sound barrier. But the XB-1 is just the beginning of Boom’s ambitions; it is a one-third scale prototype of the company’s planned Overture aircraft, which has been pre-ordered by airlines like United with the intent of carrying passengers starting in 2029.

The Overture will be Boom’s first full-scale aircraft for commercial aircraft for commercial use. Designed for up to 80 passengers, it will fly at a cruising speed of Mach 1.7 (1304 mph) over water, meaning it would be able to fly from New York to London in 3.5 hours — half the time it takes with today’s commercial jets. If successful, the Overture would be able to fly more than 600 mostly transoceanic routes without any change to existing overflight land regulations.

Those regulations typically prohibit commercial airplanes from flying at supersonic speeds over land. The reason? The noise from sonic booms is so loud it would be severely upsetting to people down below if they were frequent occurrences; beyond that, sonic booms could potentially shatter windows and cause property damage. And although Boom initially pitched its business to avoid over-land supersonic flight, it recently announced a technological breakthrough that might change the game there, too.

That’s because, a few weeks after the successful supersonic test of the XB-1, the company announced that during the test flight, it had been able to break the sound barrier three times without generating a sonic boom that reached the ground — thereby demonstrating the possibility of quiet supersonic travel for the first time.

It was able to do this by using a physics principle known as Mach Cutoff, a supersonic flight technique that uses atmospheric conditions to prevent sonic booms from reaching the ground. This breakthrough will allow the Overture to fly over land at speeds up to Mach 1.3 (997mph) — almost 300 mph faster than the top speed of today’s fastest commercial jet, the Boeing 747-8i.

This would allow an overland trip like New York to LA, for example, to be 90 minutes faster; meanwhile, hybrid trips like Chicago to Frankfurt would also be incrementally faster using what the company has dubbed “Boomless Cruise” over land. As it stands, regulation remains in place that would prevent such a trip — but such regulations were enacted before Boom’s technological breakthrough.

All in all, Boom Supersonic’s test flight feels like a watershed moment in an industry that has flourished on the demand side, but stagnated on the supply side and in terms of technological progress. As we showed in our 2025 Tech Trends Report released last month, airline passenger and freight demand has quadrupled during the 1990s, but both the size of the US air carrier flight and the speed of its planes have flatlined. Cost reduction has mostly come from the fact that airline fuel efficiency has doubled over the past 60 years (Boom’s aircraft will be up to 100% compatible with sustainable aviation fuel).

Although Boom and its competitors are a long way from commercial aviation, and although price points are initially bound to be high (with business travel a primary use case), many view the return of supersonic flight with optimism. Among their number is Elon Musk, who responded to Boom CEO Blake Scholl’s complaint about the ban on supersonic flight “regardless of noise profile” with the promise that “this administration will get rid of all regulations that make no sense, like this one.” If everything goes according to plan, as Altimeter Capital’s Brad Gerstner commented, “the US is going supersonic!”.

Lightmatter is a company that develops specialized chips and chip communication technology, called interconnects, using photonics. By leveraging light for data processing and communication, Lightmatter aims to improve computational power while reducing energy consumption, particularly for AI workloads and data-intensive applications. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:

• Senior Software Engineer (API) - Boston, MA or Mountain View, CA

• Infrastructure Engineer - Boston, MA or Mountain View, CA

As cloud adoption and the demand for more sophisticated data management continue to grow, Cribl’s platform offers a solution that helps companies manage the rising complexity and cost of observability data, positioning it to benefit from the ongoing modernization of enterprise data management. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:

• Engineering Manager (AI Inference Platform) - Remote (US)

• Product Manager (Cribl AI) - Remote (US)

Boom Supersonic is an airplane manufacturer that is developing supersonic airliners. In January 2025, a successful test of its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft, which went supersonic, represented “the first time an independently developed jet has broken the sound barrier”. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:

There are no current openings at the moment. Please check here for updates.

Check out some standout roles from this week.

• Jellyfish | Boston or Remote (US) - Full Stack Engineer, Data Scientist (Product), Product Designer, Data Science Director (Product Analytics)

• Grow Therapy | New York, NY or Remote (US) - Senior Product Manager (Billing Platform), Director of IT, Senior iOS Engineer, VP of Engineering

• Anthropic | San Francisco, CA, New York City, NY, Seattle, WA - Senior Software Security Engineer, Senior Software Engineer (Infrastructure), Machine Learning Engineer (Safeguards)

• Elon Musk’s X is reportedly looking at raising money at a $44 billion valuation with intentions to service some of the company’s debt, plus investing in “payments and video products.”

• President Trump’s tariff regime is threatening the slim unit economics of fast-fashion companies, like Shein.

• Samo Burja unpacks the thinking around the possibilities for space colonization and the implications of both Martian and lunar settlements. Read more about the technology required for Martian exploration in our deep dive here!

• Quantum computing is having a big week. First, with the announcement that a team at the University of Oxford has successfully gotten two quantum processors to connect and transmit information using particle entanglement.

• The second big update in the world of quantum computing came from Microsoft. The company is claiming to have created a new state of matter using a “topological semiconductor,” which isn’t a solid, liquid, or gas, and can be used to produce building blocks which can be scaled up into a quantum computer.

• A user known as “Hu Lezhi” used 600 ETH (~$1.6 million) to send a message to “WikiLeaks-designated addresses” which were “accompanied by on-chain messages in Chinese that allege misuse of emerging brain-machine interface technologies” in China.

• A segment on 60 minutes outlined the state of free speech in Germany where speech is policed, including fines and even jail time for those found guilty of “hate speech.”

• The wealth management market is shaping up to face a shortage of 100K advisors. While the demand for advice is growing, professional advisors are less available, creating an opportunity for platforms like Wealthfront.

• Mira Murati, former OpenAI exec, has announced the name of her new company, Thinking Machines Lab. The goal of the company is to help people “adapt AI systems to work for their specific needs, develop strong foundations to build more capable AI systems,” and more.

• After raising more than $200 million in funding, Humane AI is being acquired by HP for $116 million, while Human AI founders will be working with HP to “integrate AI into HP PC's, printers and connected conference rooms.”

• Linear CEO and founder, Karri Saarinen, published an essay called “The Profitable Startup” describing how “once you're profitable, you stop worrying about survival and focus on what really matters: building something great. Building the way you want.”

• OpenAI’s user base has reportedly grown to 400 million users, up from 300 million users in December. Alex Kantrowitz published an essay titled “OpenAI Is an App Company Now” explaining how the company is, increasingly, leaning into its consumer application business.

• Figure announced Helix, its new generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model. The company also showed a demo video of two humanoid robots attempting to understand the context of a series of groceries in order to put them away.

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