Contrary Research Rundown #47
Contrary Research Rundown #47
Startup Search + Contrary Research, plus new memos on Socure, Vannevar, and more
Startup Search + Contrary Research
At Contrary, our focus is on building connections between exceptional people and exceptional companies. Startup Search is our flagship tool to help people find roles at the best tech companies. Contrary Research is the best starting place to understand any private company.
Starting today, Startup Search will be combining with Contrary Research! We’re pairing the startup job opportunities from Startup Search with the comprehensive private company analysis of Contrary Research to create one unified reading experience.
Readers will continue to receive a weekly newsletter combining the latest research breakdowns, some of the most interesting startup jobs, stories our team has been reading, and events — all in one.
Scroll on to check out this week’s jobs and stayed tuned as we roll out more features in the coming weeks!
Vannevar Labs is building a software platform focused on collecting, processing, and interpreting foreign language text data for the defense industry. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Chief of Staff - Remote
Lead Software Engineer, New Products - Remote
Senior Software Engineer, Fullstack - Remote
Socure is a digital identity verification and management platform providing predictive analytics to understand user behavior and potential threats.. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Staff Software Engineer - Chennai
Sr. Solution Consultant - USA (Remote)
Director of Engineering - India (Remote)
Redwood Materials recycles lithium-ion batteries from EVs and consumer electronics in order to extract anode and cathode components, refine them into reusable material, and repurpose them for battery cell production by US auto manufacturers. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Software Engineer, Backend - Remote
Staff Systems Design Engineer - Carson City
Mechanical Design Engineer - Leeds Area
Tropic initially started as procurement-as-a-service solution, but in the past year, it has expanded into a broad suite of tools to streamline spend management, from negotiation and procurement to accounting and spend optimization. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Account Executive - USA (Remote)
Product Design Manager - USA (Remote)
Senior Manager, Data Operations - USA (Remote)
Check out some standout roles from this week.
Principal Product Manager - AI | MessageBird | EMEA (Remote)
Intern: Science NYC | Pinecone | NYC
Fullstack Engineer | Hex | US (Remote)
Andrew Gao and Sarah Gao published a paper titled “On the Origin of LLMs: An Evolutionary Tree and Graph for 15,821 Large Language Models” to demonstrate a hierarchical clustering of the thousands of LLMs on Hugging Face. To learn more about Hugging Face, check out our memo.
Adam Turner, the CEO of Postscript, shared a report showing how brands using SMS sales solutions can see customer conversions increase from 28% to 45%, which results in 5-15% higher GMVs. To learn more about Postscript, check out our memo.
CoreWeave seems to have come out of nowhere, having recently raised $400 million in funding, built a $1.6 billion data center in Texas, and is building the world’s fastest supercomputer in partnership with Nvidia. The company went from $30 million in revenue to an estimated $500 million this year!
Meta released its generative AI product for audio, called Audiocraft. The model consists of three components: MusicGen, trained on licensed music, AudioGen, based on sound effects, and their EnCodec decoder for more complex music generation.
NeuraLink, a company building human-brain interfaces, announced a $280 million new round of funding led by Founders Fund.
Zoom announced a controversial change to its terms of service, indicating that the company would use customer data to train AI models without customer’s ability to opt out. After the backlash, the company walked back its plans, saying it wouldn’t use audio, video, chat, or similar data to train its AI models.
Speaking of Zoom, the company was also in the news this week as the company that was most synonymous with COVID-era work-from-home has now announced a requirement for employees to return to full-time in the office.
As part of the Forbes Cloud 100, Forbes shared a profile on Wiz, outlining how the company had reached $200 million ARR in 3 years, and a $10 billion valuation. To learn more about Wiz, check out our memo.
Forbes also shared a profile on DeepL, outlining the company’s plans to take on Google Translate and ChatGPT. To learn more about DeepL, check out our memo.
Amplitude announced Amplitude AI, a generative AI model trained on product usage data, the latest example of incumbent platforms integrating AI into their existing products. The vision of Amplitude’s product is to enable self-improving products.
Weights & Biases, an MLOps platform that counts OpenAI as a customer, announced a $50 million Series D, led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, appeared on a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel. To learn more about Anthropic, and the company’s history, check out our deep dive on the openness of AI.
Tome, a startup building generative AI for presentations, is in talks to raise a $60 million round of funding at a $600 million valuation on an estimated $2 million of revenue.
Helion, a nuclear fusion startup, was awarded an INFUSE grant in partnership with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) Laboratory in the pursuit of commercial fusion systems. To learn more about Helion, check out our memo.
Chinese tech companies, such as Alibaba, Baidu, ByteDance and Tencent, have ordered $5 billion worth of GPUs from Nvidia in anticipation of the US potentially limiting their export.
The City of San Francisco has announced that Robotaxis like Alphabet’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise, can now operate in the city 24/7. For more context on the driverless taxi market, check out our memo on Nuro.
Rich Holmes, in The Department of Product, profiled Slack’s major product redesign that was built to help users feel less anxious about missing messages, and instead cater more effectively to remote workers.
Hopin, a virtual events platform that raised $1 billion in funding and reached a peak valuation of $7.7 billion, announced it was selling off its flagship events business to RingCentral for $50 million and returning some capital to investors.
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!