Contrary Research Rundown #54
The State of Fintech Infrastructure, plus refreshed memos on Arcadia and Pave
Register here to join us on October 26th for our next in-person fireside chat: the State of Fintech Infrastructure. Our own Megan Kao, along with Marc Andrusko (Partner at a16z), will be unpacking the category with the founders who are building in it! Featuring Dylan Parker (CEO of Moment), Stuart Wall (CEO of Setpoint), Paolo Bertolotti (CEO of ModernFi), and Jose Bethancourt (CEO of Method Financial)
Space is limited — register here and we’ll be in touch in the coming weeks.
Research Rundown
Ahead of event on The State of Fintech Infrastructure next month, we’ve released our latest Living Landscape on the subject as well. While it’s easy to dismiss fintech as dead, with venture funding coming back down to earth, and public fintech’s trading at 4x multiples (down from 20x), the reality is there is still so much opportunity in the category.
While fintech revenue is expected to grow from $245 billion to $1.5 trillion (6X) by 2030, this would still only represent an increase from 2% to 7% market share within the global financial services market. Regulation, infrastructure, and generative AI are spurring change in the market for fintech, all of which will have implications for payments, capital markets, lending and more.
Check out our full Living Landscape here, and be sure to login to Figma and leave comments. What did we miss? What else should be on the map?
Arcadia is a climate software and data company that specializes in decarbonizing the electric grid. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Product Manager - Chennai
Uniswap is an on-chain decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol built on top of Ethereum for swapping ERC-20 tokens. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Senior Backend Engineer - NYC (Remote)
Senior Software Engineer, Protocols - NYC (Remote)
Pave is a compensation management software company that digitizes the way in which companies make compensation decisions. To learn more, read our full memo here and check out some open roles below:
Product Design Manager - SF, NYC
Check out some standout roles from this week.
ConductorOne | Remote - PM, Senior Product Designer
Pinecone | NYC - PM (Enterprise), Senior SWE (Infrastructure and Tools)
Masterclass is toning down the glamor of its episodes, shortening them and reducing headcount to save money. The piece highlights some of the exorbitant costs of shooting an episode with Disney CEO Bob Iger.
OpenAI announced ChatGPT upgrades, including a voice for verbal conversation and an image search. To learn more about OpenAI, check out our memo.
Speaking of OpenAI, the company is seeking a $90 billion valuation in a potential sale of its existing shares.
Wallaroo.ai, Ampere, and Oracle have formed a partnership to allow inference to be run on CPUs to reduce costs. This is especially relevant considering ongoing GPU supply issues.
Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf was interviewed on the Stratechery podcast to discuss his engineering background, the founding story of Anduril, and the relationship between technology companies and the DOD. To learn more about Anduril, check out our memo.
Waabi, a self-driving truck startup, put a small fleet of trucks on the Uber Freight platform.
Salesforce announced that it is acquiring Airkit.ai, a low-code customer service platform. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
David Limp, the former leader of Amazon’s Alexa and Echo projects, will be taking over as the CEO of Blue Origin.
Lucid announced that it is laying off 7% of its workforce, or about 75 employees.
Talkdesk, a software company seeking to improve customer service at large corporations, announced its third round of layoffs in less than 14 months.
Palo Alto Networks is in advanced talks to acquire Talon and Dig in a $1 billion cybersecurity sweep.
Helion Energy announced that it is collaborating with Nucor, a steel manufacturing company, to deploy a 500 MW fusion power plant in an effort to decarbonize industrial manufacturing. To learn more about Helion Energy, check out our memo.
SpaceX announced that it won its first Pentagon contract for Starshield, a satellite network designed for military use. To learn more about SpaceX, check out our memo.
AlphaSense, an AI-based market intel firm, raised $150 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.
Epic Games announced that it is laying off 16% of its workforce. To learn more about Epic Games, check out our memo.
Meta introduced its open source AI virtual assistant, Llama. To learn more about the openness of AI, check out our deep dive.
“Ben’s Bites” released an article on the founding story of Glean, a leader in the AI space. To learn more about Glean, check out our memo.
A special committee was appointed to investigate Solid’s revenue numbers. Solid, a fintech paltform, was accused of fraud and negligence in a $9 million lawsuit.
Register here to join us on Thursday, October 5th for Contrary’s first Tech Talk — an evening of technical demos and conversation featuring senior leaders from Hugging Face, Graphite, Replit, Slingshot AI, and Nomic.
Check out our latest episode of Research Radio, where we sit down with Knowde CEO, Ali Amin-Javaheri, as we unpack how his company is working to bring a $5 trillion industry online from paper and pencil. For more on Knowde, you can also check out our memo!