Contrary Research Rundown #46
Announcing Contrary Research Radio, plus new memos on Zepto, Tecton, and more
Research Rundown
Contrary Research is all about storytelling. Every company represents a story, from the founding “aha” moment to the intricacies of the GTM motion. Each memo we produce is meant to be the best starting place to understand any private tech company. But beyond the starting point, there is always an opportunity to go deeper.
This week, we announced the launch of Contrary Research Radio, a podcast where Kyle Harrison will be diving deeper into the topics and questions that arise from each of the companies we research. In our first episode, we went deeper with Aidan Gomez, the CEO of Cohere. As the AI landscape has continued to heat up, Aidan explored how he’s thought carefully about which large enterprises he’s aligning himself with.
Beyond Cohere’s strategic positioning, we also discussed the moment in time that AI is experiencing. “A lot of the time it feels like we’ve been standing in the same place for years, and the market has been moving towards us.” Aidan’s experience as a co-author of the critical “Attention Is All You Need” paper gave him a front-row seat to things like Transformer architecture that has enabled breakthroughs like GPT. Now, the question is what’s next?
To hear Aidan’s perspective on how the space evolves, be sure to listen to the full episode here, and subscribe on your favorite podcast player to catch our next episode!
Arctic Wolf provides enterprise-class security to small and medium-sized organizations which lack the expertise and resources navigate the universe of cybersecurity products and services, or develop their own solutions. To learn more, read our full memo here.
MessageBird is a cloud communications platform that provides a range of communication tools for businesses to engage with their customers through various channels. To learn more, read our full memo here.
Tecton, founded in 2018 by the team which built the Michelangelo ML platform at Uber, is building a feature platform for production ML applications. To learn more, read our full memo here.
Zepto is a grocery and consumer product rapid delivery company founded on the idea that faster delivery speeds could lead to better (instead of worse) unit economics. To learn more, read our full memo here.
Prashanth Chandrasekar, the CEO of Stack Overflow, announced OverflowAI, a generative AI platform to help developers find answers to their questions.
Vendr published a report comparing different SaaS tools based on ACV size and transaction counts. The results showed comparisons like, as an example, Salesforce with a 3.3x higher ACV than Hubspot. You can learn more about Vendr in our memo.
The Verge published a report telling the story of Neeva, the privacy-focused search engine that hoped to displace Google but failed. Ultimately, the company pivoted to B2B use cases, and was acquired by Snowflake.
Zach Perret, the CEO of Plaid, was on Bloomberg to discuss FedNow, an instant payment service created by the Federal Reserve. Perret expressed support for the program, believing it would increase consumer choice and quality, especially among fintech applications. You can learn more about Plaid in our memo.
dbt Labs announced a new product, the dbt Cloud Scheduler, which helps increase efficiency in the types of jobs that are being run. You can learn more about dbt Labs in our memo.
Fortune published an overview of how Google has attempted to respond to the rapid changes in AI, all while trying to protect its $160 billion search business.
One viral post outlined the idea that believing in the success of one centralized foundation model becoming the only option is akin to believing in the centralization of Communism. We explored this kind of dichotomy between proprietary and open source models in our latest deep dive.
Ramp announced its newest platform, Ramp Plus, a centralized place for finance teams to manage Ramp’s various products. You can learn more about Ramp in our memo.
MrBeast is suing his 3rd party partner who operated the MrBeast Burger brand. This is the latest in a series of upsets in the previously celebrated creator economy. As powerful as an existing brand is, it can’t necessarily make up for poor operations.
Rippling announced its newest product, Rippling Recruiting, an ATS to manage the top-of-funnel employee experience that feeds into its core employee management product. You can learn more about Rippling in our memo.
Vinay Iyengar, an investor at Foundation Capital, shared an overview of Zoho, an SMB CRM that has scaled to over $1 billion in ARR without raising any capital.
Nicolas Neubert shared a thread on the creation of an entirely AI-generated trailer using Midjourney and Runway. You can learn more about Runway in our memo.
Index Ventures shared an update on their portfolio company, Wiz, which managed to scale to $100 million ARR in 18 months, and now three years into its life has surpassed $200 million ARR. You can learn more about Wiz in our memo.
After raising $150 million in funding from Al Gore’s fund, Generation Investment Management, OneTrust CEO Kabir Barday, gave an interview where he discussed the company’s path to going public in the near future.
Stripe has named Steffan Tomlinson, the former CFO of Confluent, as its new CFO. He’s previously served as the CFO of Aruba Networks and Palo Alto Networks. All three companies (Confluent, Aruba, and Palo Alto) went public while he was serving as CFO, indicating clearly that Stripe has near-term IPO plans.
Storage startup Clutter, previously valued at $600 million by investors like SoftBank and Sequoia, sold itself to one of its business partners for $15 million.
Georgia Power announced that Plant Vogtle, the first nuclear power plant built from scratch in decades, is now open. The project took 7 years longer than expected, and ran $17 billion over budget.
Hopin, a COVID darling that provides virtual event software, sold a part of its business to RingCentral. Once valued at $7.7 billion by investors, the company has seen a steep drop in usage of its platform, from 15K events in November 2020 to fewer than 500 as of April 2022.
The U.S. government recently announced a new $3.5 billion fund, setup as part of a bipartisan infrastructure bill, to invest in large-scale industrial facilities that will work to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
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!