Drone swarms in warfare are becoming more common. Epirus is building high power energy weapons as a response. In a word? What they've created is force fields. In this episode, we sat down with Epirus CEO Andy Lowery. Read our full memo on Epirus' business. Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newsletter Legal: https://www.contrary.com/legal...
Base Power aims to become the “modern power company of the electric era” by offering its customers a home energy service powered by a network of batteries. In this episode, we sat down with Base Power co-founders Zach Dell (CEO) and Justin Lopas (COO). Read our full memo on Base Power's business. Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newsletter Legal: https://www.contrary.com/legal...
Lumafield provides low-cost industrial scanners. Its goal is to build the world's best database of manufactured objects to help "take humans out of the loop" and enable fully autonomous manufacturing. In this episode, we sat down with Eduardo Torrealba, the CEO and co-founder of Lumafield. Read our full memo on Lumafield's business. Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newsletter Legal: https://www.contrary.com/legal...
America's industrial base could be on the verge of collapse. Hadrian is setting out to build an automated solution to unlocking the manufacturing capacity in the US. We sat down with CEO and Founder of Hadrian, Chris Power. Read our full memo on Hadrian's business. Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newsletter Legal: https://www.contrary.com/legal
JumpCloud is offering companies a cloud-native solution to manage their identity directory without having to “sell their soul”, so to speak, by becoming a wall-to-wall Microsoft stack. We sat down with CTO and Co-founder of JumpCloud, Greg Keller. Read our deep dive on the identity security world. Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newsletter Legal: https://www.contrary.com/legal...
Stytch * is building a developer platform for companies to implement frictionless authentication methods. The company’s APIs and SDKs streamline user onboarding and bolster retention by eliminating passwords and replacing them with secure, lower-friction authentication options. We sat down with CEO and Co-founder of Stytch, Reed McGinley-Stempel. * Contrary is an investor in Stytch through one or more affiliates. Read our memo on the Stytch's business Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newslette...
Highnote is a full-stack card issuance platform with the intention of owning the entire stack, rather than sitting on top of another gateway or middle layer. So how are companies thinking about using a tool like Highnote today? We sat down with CEO and Co-founder of Highnote, John Macllwaine, to unpack that process. Read our deep dive on the evolution of fintech infrastructure . Subscribe to the Contrary Research Newsletter Legal: https://www.contrary.com/legal...
Zip provides a platform for the end-to-end procurement lifecycle, covering new purchase order management, accounts payable (AP) automation, and global B2B payments. Zip makes it easy for employees to request purchases and provides visual workflows for approvals across finance, legal, procurement, IT, and security teams. Zip Co-Founder and CEO, Rujul Zaparde, joined Research Radio to talk about the reason for focusing specifically on intake as they tackle trillions of dollars in business spend. R...
Sardine is a company that helps companies prevent fraud. Sardine has focused their product around a fraud prevention system. This is made up of a few key parts: (1) a fraud detection algorithm, (2) a no-code rule builder, and (3) an all-in-one dashboard and case manager for risk operations teams Sardine Co-Founder and CEO, Soups Ranjan, joined Research Radio to talk about the rising risk of fraud in most online transactions, and what the cutting edge looks like for tackling those types of risks....
MongoDB develops and provides a popular NoSQL database program which is designed for managing and storing large sets of varied data. MongoDB Ventures is the investment arm of MongoDB, focusing on supporting early-stage companies that are innovating in the developer productivity, data management, and SaaS markets. Its position gives MongoDB Ventures a really fascinating perspective on the tech industry and what's coming next. Today we're joined by Suraj Patel , who heads up MongoDB Ventures. He t...
Lithic , founded in 2014 as Privacy.com, provides an API platform for building card issuing and processing solutions. It simplifies the process of card issuing, authorization, and transaction processing for startups and fintechs of all sizes. Lithic co-founder and CEO Bo Jiang joined Research Radio to talk about how payment and card processing works, where the company fits in the fintech stack, and what the future of payments looks like. Read our full memo on Lithic. Subscribe to the Contrary Re...
Lucid makes visual productivity and collaboration tools like Lucidchart and Lucidspark, helping teams brainstorm, and build diagrams and data visualizations. It has become a titan of visual collaboration, serving 60 million users and generating over $100 million of annual revenue. Lucid was last valued at $3 billion. Lucid CEO Dave Grow joined Research Radio to talk about Lucid, keeping growth strong after the COVID remote work boom, and owning the "idea to reality" workflow. Subscribe to th...
Founded in 2018, Persona is an automated identity verification platform which uses machine learning, computer vision, and algorithmic checks to help businesses confirm their users and customers are who they say they are. Co-founder and CEO Rick Song joined Research Radio to talk about Persona, physical and online identity, and how he's building the "AWD of identity". Read our full memo on Persona. Subscribe to the Contrary Research newsletter. Legal: https://contrary.com/legal...
With the rise of ChatGPT and other LLM-powered chatbots, there has been a gold rush to get conversational AI into enterprise. Moveworks , founded in 2016, is an enterprise AI co-pilot that helps employees find information, resolve issues, and get help across 100+ business systems. Co-founder and CEO Bhavin Shah joined Research Radio to talk about how Moveworks makes employees more productive, how it overcomes corporate "knowledge silos" and the future of work automation. Subscribe to the Contrar...
Stack Overflow has been one of the key parts of the software development universe since it was founded in 2008, and it has developed from a question-and-answer platform to a crucial resource. Whether they're debugging an error, trying to understand a new concept, or optimizing a piece of code, Stack Overflow has long been the first place programmers go to find answers. But the rise of AI and LLMs poses an interesting challenge. After all, why go to Stack Overflow for a coding question when you c...
The chemicals industry is one of the world's largest, touching virtually every manufactured good from the phone in your pocket to the car you drive and the food you eat. But despite its size, the industry remains largely offline, and runs on old school sales. Knowde is a chemicals marketplace which connects buyers and sellers of chemicals, polymers and ingredients. Founder and CEO Ali Amin-Javaheri joined Contrary Research Radio to talk about Knowde and where it fits in the chemical industry. Re...
Common Room provides unified intelligence across a company's various online communities – from public squares like X/Twitter, to private spaces like Discord and Slack. It helps software companies get actionable insights into their user and developer communities, and assists them in sending those users the right message at the right time. Co-founder and CEO Linda Lian joined Kyle Harrison on Contrary Research Radio to talk about the modern brand journey, how communities help with customer acquisi...
Hex is a collaborative data workspace that allows both technical and non-technical users to analyze, collaborate on, and share their data work. It wants to do for data what Figma did for design. Co-founder and CEO Barry McCardel joined Contrary Research Radio to talk about the “insane” ways data scientists share and collaborate, and how Hex is trying to make it better. Read our full research memo on Hex. Subscribe to the Contrary Research newsletter. Legal: https://contrary.com/legal...
As anyone who has tried finding a spot on a busy weekend will tell you: parking can be a nightmare. It's also big business – and it might be an even bigger business than you imagined. AirGarage, founded in 2017, is a full-stack parking management platform. It handles everything from payments and enforcement to maintenance and marketing for owners of parking real estate. That means everything from a small parking lot at a church up to a huge multi-storey parking complex in the middle of a major c...
It's no secret that the biggest hype in tech is around AI and large language models (LLMs). Cohere , founded in 2019, builds general purpose language models and provides access to them through an API. Its goal is to help enterprise leverage the power of LLMs to complete a range of useful tasks. With Cohere, companies can bring natural language processing to their applications without spending big on training models or hiring. Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, was credited as a co-autho...
