Contrary Research Rundown #14
Understanding private markets, and new memos on Niantic, Brex, and more
Research Rundown
Finding information and data on private companies is hard. Our mission at Contrary Research is to open-source that data and curate all the best knowledge on private markets. This week, we shared some of the best resources that we utilize for researching private companies. See the full list of resources here.
Some of the challenges in understanding private companies comes from the intricacies of a business model. Take, for example, The Boring Company. The business operates with massive long-term government contracts, and has an intricate web of financing options from different government entities and interested parties. You can see our full thread on The Boring Company.
Another aspect of understanding the markets that private companies play in is understanding the trends that they're riding. The IDC estimates over 750M new cloud-native apps will be created by 2025. Over the past five years, we’ve seen the proliferation of SaaS tools within the enterprise. We shared our memo on Vendr which is a company that helps SMBs and enterprise track and manage their SaaS spending. Helping companies to manage that growing wave of applications is going to be increasingly important.
Finally, we have to understand the defensibility of private companies. Sometimes, you can look for similar business models to appreciate whether or not a particular private company actually has a competitive moat. We can look at persona-specific systems of record, like GitHub or Atlassian's Jira for developers as a comparable example for one of our recent memos. Products like Jira are incredibly sticky because they make it easier for engineers to manage software development cycles. Productboard wants to be the system of record for product managers by providing a software platform that helps with product management. See our memo on Productboard
Netlify: a web development platform for building dynamic websites and applications. Netlify provides continuous application deployment that enables developers to push and deploy code rapidly. Read the full memo.
Brex: a fintech company offering credit cards and cash management solutions. It also offers corporate cards, payments, bill pay, and accounting for expense management. Read the full memo.
Niantic: a developer of mobile-based augmented reality games and hardware. The company is behind multiple adventurous games including the famous Pokemon GO, Ingress, and Pikmin Boom. Read the full memo.
Coupa was taken private by Thomas Bravo in an $8B deal. Coupa is a leading platform for business spend management. The acquisition price came as a surprise to many, despite management’s strong forecasts.
Rex Woodbury spoke to 40 investors, founders, and operators about the one thing that not enough people are paying attention to heading in 2023 and shared their perspectives and predictions for 2023.
This week, Snyk announced a $196M round at $7.4B valuation, a slight down-round to their previous valuation. This article highlights some of the key tailwinds around developer security that Snyk is riding. To learn more about the full story and business behind Snyk, read our full memo.
a16z published a SaaS benchmarking tool for B2B companies based on a16z’s data and investing team’s research. The platform can be used for companies to gauge their performance across stages.
a16z also published their Big Ideas in Tech for 2023 to discuss key themes they expect to see across fintech, crypto, enterprise tech, games, biotech, consumer tech, and other key categories.
Dataiku is an AI and analytics platform that provides an end-to-end machine learning-based platform for big data analysis. This week they announced a $200M round at a $3.7B valuation. In the fundraising news, they revealed they had crossed over $150M ARR.
Camille Ricketts, the first head of marketing at Notion, was on a podcast with Lenny Rachitsky sharing the story of how Notion leveraged community to build a $10B business.
Jeff Burke put out a piece on Knowde, the one-stop digital chemicals marketplace. Jeff’s report explores key product areas and market opportunities within chemicals. If you missed our report, you can read our full memo here.
Founders Fund Partner Sam Blond and Rippling VP Sales Matt Plank had an insightful conversation about Rippling’s business, their team, and the market opportunities in HR tech.
Scale Ventures examine both the qualitative and quantitative elements of the strongest SaaS businesses going into 2023 in their report "This Is What Winning In SaaS Looks Like In 2023." The report features Box as a case study to illustrate different market cycles for SaaS.
Replit announced Bounties, a product that provides builders the ability to share aspects of what they're working on, and offer to pay anyone who can help them complete it.
Base10 Partners published a report and market map on the 3D ecosystem. They highlight the key companies and themes worth watching.
Contrary Research Fellowship
At Contrary Research our vision is to cover hundreds of 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, consultants, and more. If you're interested in researching and writing about tech companies, apply here!