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​What's New:

• Announcing the official launch of Foundations & Frontiers, an essay series by Contrary!
• Over at Contrary Research, new reports on Railway, Clickup, Navan, Glossier, and Dialpad.

Foundations & Frontiers

Today we're excited to officially announce the launch of Foundations & Frontiers, an essay series by Contrary. Due to tremendous reader response to the early entries in the series which have been published over the last six months, we're breaking Foundations & Frontiers out into its own media publication.

Foundations & Frontiers is a digital magazine that explores the technologies that will define the future. Just as Contrary is an investment firm that backs bold founders building the technologies of tomorrow, this series revisits the foundations of technologies to help arm builders with the context and ideas to push forward the frontier of innovation.

Read on to get a more detailed sense of the vision of the series, as well as a recap of some of our existing essays and a roadmap of what to expect going forward.

Contrary Research

Contrary Research publishes thoughtful analysis of the best private technology companies. Here are the latest reports published this week:

Railway: As development tools become increasingly powerful, new disciplines have emerged dedicated to configuring, maintaining, and releasing infrastructure. Over time, the industry has implemented additional layers of abstraction to make the tools and services more configurable and powerful. Railway is a software deployment platform tailored for engineers to simplify the deployment of apps and services. Its goal is to make it easy for engineers to deploy infrastructure. Read the full report here.

Navan: The global business travel market is massive, having been valued at $787.8 billion in 2021. However, navigating corporate travel policies, booking and ticketing systems, and expense management can be tedious for business travelers. Navan is an end-to-end travel management platform for corporations with booking, tracking, reporting, and expensing tools. Navan uses modern software coupled with 24/7 traveler support and incentives to solve common problems in business travel. Read the full report here.

Glossier: In the early 2010s, a chasm emerged between legacy beauty brands like L’Oreal and Estée Lauder and younger generations. These legacy brands were slow to adapt to a shifting culture that increasingly favored brands that built a strong online community over traditional companies that relied heavily on a brick-and-mortar presence. Glossier is a direct-to-consumer beauty and skincare brand that leverages content and community to power a superior shopping experience. Glossier’s product lines include modern essentials spanning skincare, makeup, body, and fragrance. Read the full report here.

ClickUp: Organizations are increasingly managing a larger variety of apps. This presents challenges such as high costs, inefficient management, security concerns, and decreased productivity. App overload is transforming the digital workplace.ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform that brings teams, tasks, and tools together in one place. Read the full report here.

Dialpad: Dialpad is a cloud-based business communication, collaboration, and contact center platform. It offers real-time transcription, automated note-taking, live sentiment, and voice analytics. Its products cover the full range of business communications needs across voice, video, group messaging, text, conferencing, screen sharing, and document-sharing services, enabling employees to collaborate in a single platform. Dialpad integrates UCaas and CCaaS. It brands this as TrueCaaS, a platform with the aim of giving users a “single pane of glass” for all business communications. Read the full report here.