The Research Rundown

We had an eventful week, including a new launch from across the Contrary org. First off, we launched the second entry in our cybersecurity series this week, after publishing our industry primer. You can see a summary in our Twitter thread as well.

On Thursday, we had our Replit x Contrary Research event with the Founder and CEO of Replit, Amjad Masad. Stay tuned for a recording of the highlights from the event. It was a wide-ranging conversation about AI, the future of developer tools, education, and how to build a company with as few committees as possible.

At Contrary Research, we focus on company storytelling. But often, there is a rich history around the underlying technology that makes the world go round. As part of Contrary's broader content umbrella, we launched Foundations & Frontiers this week. This is a written series by Anna-Sofia Lesiv that explores the first principles of technologies that govern our world and the companies working on solutions within these ecosystems. See her first report on “The Past and Future of Metallurgy,” and follow the Contrary blog to keep up with the series.

Another exciting side note. While everyone is obsessed with Elon Musk's next moves at Twitter, there was some other-worldly Elon-related news this week. SpaceX grounded a recent Falcon 9 rocket that was scheduled to deliver a lunar lander into space. In celebration of the Falcon 9 series, we wanted to take a spin through the history of SpaceX as a company. You can see our Twitter breakdown on SpaceX, as well as our full research memo.

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Deep Dive

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All of our deep dives focus on the areas where different companies start to converge and define the industries in which they operate. A few weeks ago, we released our primer on the broader cybersecurity space. This week, we dug into the specifics of the endpoint security market.

The Era of Endpoints

The first cybersecurity companies in the 1980s, such as McAfee and Trend Micro, provided endpoint security services. By the 2000s, Symantec’s Norton rose to become an early pioneer in endpoint security. Today, companies like CrowdStrike have leveraged the cloud to become market leaders.

Enterprise endpoints are often the target of attack vectors against organizations, and represent one of the most fragmented attack surface areas. The sophistication of new attacks has given birth to adjacent endpoint solutions. This week, we dug into some of those solutions and the emerging categories that they're creating. Read our full report here.​

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Light Memos

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Knowde: An online B2B marketplace for chemicals. They provide a platform that allows producers & consumers to buy & sell raw materials. They also help sellers set up digital storefronts to handle discovery, analytics, marketing, and more. Read the full memo here​

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Eightsleep: A thermoregulated mattress, and mattress cover. to help improve sleep. Their smart mattress with adjusted temperatures has proven to allow users to fall asleep faster, improve sleep quality and monitor health metrics. Read the full memo here​

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Public: A social trading platform for users to buy & sell equity, crypto, and more. It features tools for accessing historical analysis, tracking investments, and referencing news articles for investing. Read the full memo here​

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Company Stories We're Reading

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• ​Anduril, a defense and AI company, announced a $1.4 billion funding round. This was one of the largest funding rounds in 2022, just behind SpaceX’s $1.7 billion round earlier this year. To learn more about the hype around Anduril’s business and technology, read our full memo here.
• One of the biggest discussions this past week was about OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT. A conversational intelligence model that can understand context, and provide detailed responses to specific questions. Some examples so far include things like helping people build apps on platforms like Replit or automatically building a model.
• This week, most of the tech industry was participating in Amazon's re:Invent conference. Jamin Ball shared some takeaways from the conference.
• ​Nadia Asparouhova wrote a deep dive mapping out the different tribes within climate solutions, and why there has been a resurgence of people going to work in the industry.
• Speaking of climate solutions, Hemant Mohapatra shared Lightspeed's climate tech market map.
• Coatue’s Sri Viswanath wrote an insightful piece for startups and teams trying to scale up engineering productivity. The report goes through an in-depth step-by-step playbook.
• Altimeter released a database of over 250 AI/ML companies that are innovating in the world of machine learning.
• MongoDB announced a new partnership with Databricks that now features MongoDB as a data source within a Databricks notebook. This feature will offer data practitioners with an easier and more curated experience for connecting Databricks with MongoDB Atlas data.
• News of the new MongoDB + Databricks partnership came around Snowflake’s earnings report this week. To understand the differences between both companies, check out our full memo on Databricks vs. Snowflake.
• Michael Dempsey, and the team at Compound, published a research database laying out a number of investment themes across industries. See the full database here.

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Announcements

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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!

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Thank you for your support. Have a great weekend!