New Technologies and Promising Companies for 2024
You know, the drill. As usual this is not investment advice. This is for entertainment purposes only and I make no claims about the accuracy of the information.
New Information Technologies
| Technology | Why are they interesting? |
|---|---|
| ZK proofs (Zero Knowledge tech) | Share confidential information w/ out revealing it. The applications go way beyond just crypto. Useful for healthcare, government, finance, etc. |
| Homomorphic encryption | A way to do computation on encrypted data. e.g. can produce a voting machine where all results are encrypted but you can sum the votes accurately. |
| LLMs (large language models) | Enables a lot of stuff that was previously impossible. Can manipulate and text better than humans. Can learn and perform zero shot (no training) tasks. |
| Diffusion models | Enables creation and analysis of images with little to no training. |
| Multimodal models | Multiple types of data, e.g. text + audio + image + any other data. |
| Reinforcement learning models | e.g. Teaching a robot how to walk. Solve a complex task by continually trying to do it. |
| Graph nueral networks | Models designed to work w/ graph structured data. Can learn and make predictions based on relationships between data. |
| Decentralized Identity (DID) | A way to authorize & authenticate users w/ only decentralized networks. Becomes increasingly important especially w/ AI. |
New hardware technologies
| Name / Category | Description | Example Companies |
|---|---|---|
| Galium nitride semiconductors | As opposed to silicon it has higher efficiency and can be useful for lower power consumption. | Cree, Efficient Power Conversion, GaN systems. |
| Solid state batteries | Solid electrolyte instead of liquid. Allows for higher density & faster charging. | Quantumscape (?) |
| High density 3D Nand | 128 layer 3d NAND memory. Increase density + capacity of solid state drives. | Samsung, western digital |
| Micro LEDs | Microscopic LEDs, offer superior brightness & power consumption to OLED / LCD displays. | Apple, samsung, LG |
| High power fiber lasers | Multi KW continuous wave output now possible. Defense, manufacturing applications. | IPG Photonics, Coherent corp, nLight |
| Ultrafast lasers | Extremely short pulse lasers - imaging, research, materials processing (manufacturing). | Amplitude lasers group, Spectra-Physics |
Moonshot companies to follow. Public or large enough to go public soon.
| Company | Technology | Details | Current Thoughts |
|---|---|---|---|
| IonQ | Quantum computing | Their qubits are more stable and they developed a way to network multiple quantum computers together. | Valuation seems extremely high. Compared to Rigetti I’m not sure it makes sense now, but all of these (quantum computing stocks) seem like strictly science projects now. |
| Cerebras | AI chips | They make full wafer sized chips, which is a unique approach that is well suited for large AI models. They are publishing benchmarks on llama-3.2 that are insanely fast. | They plan to go public soon but are held up by CIFIUS. |
| CoreWeave | AI Datacenters | They are building AI datacenter capacity all around the world. Probably a buyout target. | Plans to go public soon, they are one of the only pure play ai datacenter companies. |
| Helion Energy | Fusion | Approach is interesting because they are building a solution to directly capture electromagnetic energy so you don’t need a steam plant to get electricity from it. | Its private, their newest machine should have some interesting results. Sam Altman invested. Microsoft invested. Polaris prototype eta is 2024 so its behind schedule now. |
| Zap Energy | Fusion | Another different and interesting fusion approach. | They just raised another 160 million last month, but I am having a hard time finding information on timelines. |
| Rocket Labs | Space | Small launch provider but majority of revenue is related to satellite manufacturing and services. Is building a new launch platform (Neutron) now. | The stock has run up a lot at this point (disclosure: I own the stock but I’m not buying more here). A lot hinges on Neutron timeline (q3 2025?) and upcoming contracts. Part of this is the hype factor and being one of the few good publicly traded space companies. |
| Relativity Space | Space | 3D printed rockets. I’m not sure that was ever the hard part about rockets, but its one to watch. They seem to have a lot of hype and funding. | Its not going well for them in Ashlee Vance’s opinion |
| Anduril | Drone & Weapons platforms | The are building things like cheap drone based weaponry, surveillance systems, and platforms for managing these. They are trying to scale up automated manufacturing of these. This is definitely the future as manned fighter craft have been obsolete for a long time (according to Kelly Johnson) but the US has not embraced this for various reasons. However I believe it will because of reality: costs & China doing it. | The secondaries are EXTREMELY HOT! If this company IPOs it will rocket to an insane valuation. However, it remains to be seen if they can scale up manufacturing at low cost, etc. |
| SpaceX | Space & Telecom | SpaceX - everyone knows about it, what you may not know is that Starlink is becoming a massive revenue generator. They are launching aggressively to get the Starlink constellation in place. According to some their estimated revenue from Starlink is already in excess of 6 billion meaning they have reached escape velocity in terms of revenue. S | Again, the secondaries are extremely hot. Its not clear if they will ever IPO, and its hard to get access to shares on the public market via proxies. They recently did at tender offer at 250 billion valuation, but I believe they would easily reach a trillion dollar valuation if public given the profitability of Starlink and the hype factor. |
Large private software companies who may go public soon.
Finally, a list of good private software companies I think will go public soon and I would look hard at buying. I tend to like to wait a year or two after IPO to start buying shares. Usually people try to go public in supportive markets which will be by definition frothy. You make money when you buy as they say.
| Company | Why |
|---|---|
| Retool | Internal tools build in hours not months. I have been a customer for a number of years and they are exceptionally good. |
| Mercury | It’s a neo-bank for startups. Extremely good service, UI/UX and features for a startup bank. Integrated credit cards, expense reporting etc. |
| Rippling | Payroll, HR, Ops in a box. Its a saas that covers a lot of ground for companies and makes life easier. |
| Deel | They make hiring overseas extremely easy and cheap. |
| Anthropic | Relatively unknown outside of tech, but Claude Sonnet seems to be better for coding as an LLM than OpenAI’s LLMS and they seem to be keeping the lead. The new “computer-use” tooling could be a game changer if it gets cheaper. |
I’m thinking I will start doing this every year or so. I’m planning to get a bit more into private investing at early stages if time and finances allow and this will help me keep track of technology trends.
Written on November 25, 2024