The Business Wave #71

Apple, Monzo, Palantir...pick your favorite!

Nino Pavicic

Jun 07, 2023

Hi all,

another week is behind us, let us see what is buzzing!

(no big intros today)

Investment

(please note that we are not financial advisors and this is not by any means financial advice)

Palantir is back or is it the AI craze?

ChatGPT effect is spreading…

Palantir Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Alex Karp said new AI developments at his company are so powerful that “I’m not sure we should even sell this to some of our clients.”

Palantir was recently awarded a multiyear contract worth up to $463 million from the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), and the recent advancements they made in large language models (LLMs) and edge AI is set to reduce cognitive load on warfighters and commanders.

However, there are many things to consider when looking at Palantir 👇

They are not profitable (on a yearly basis), but their revenues do keep on growing 👇

We’ll keep a close eye on Palantir, it could become an interesting story…

Monzo profitable?

Monzo is not a public company, but it’s interesting to see how more and more neobanks are going out with profitability statements.

I’ll tell you in a minute why is this important, but let’s first check out Monzo 🔦

Annualised revenues shot up 250% to £440m in the twelve months to December 2022 — a huge uptick from the 92% revenue growth to £154.2m that the neobank reported for the year to February 2022.
Monzo now expects to break even this year — achieving a status that has, up until now, been extremely rare among Europe’s neobanks.

Now, neobanks and profitability is a very slippery slope because neobanks PR department loves to publish “we hit profitability” even though it’s only quarterly profitability.

However, for the sake of the argument let’s say that Monzo will become profitable in 2023.

If you want to go public, this helps massively with your stock price. The days when neobanks went public, and they were not profitable are over (at least for now).

But, think twice before buying in the profitability hype 👇

And then there was Apple

It’s hard to miss when Apple publishes a new version of the iPhone, but it’s impossible to miss when Apple announces something revolutionary

Apple announced its mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro, on Monday during its WWDC developer conference. The $3,499 headset is its first major new product since the Apple Watch in 2014.

It does look cool, right?

And with this cool piece you can do stuff like this 👇

The Vision Pro will allow users to see apps in a new way, in the spaces around them. Users can use their eyes and hands to navigate through apps and search with their voices. The headset can be used to watch movies, including in 3-D, with spatial audio, view their own pictures or videos, and play video games. It can also be used for work with video conferencing apps, Microsoft Office tools or Adobe Lightroom.

This is a major development in the tech space and next week you can read here deep dive into what this means for the industry.

I’m already excited about the deep dive, and I just started writing it 😎