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Hola,
 

Israel and several EU countries are ahead of the US in using phones as vaccine passports. In the US, there’s a motley patchwork of private and state-by-state systems (Excelsior Pass in NY State) for digital vaccine cards. And then there’s the politically polarizing, but IMO separate debate re: mandated cards.

I’m just left scratching my head about why there’s no broader protocol for someone who wants to opt in.

One pioneer here is the NBA. The league announced a tech-enabled pass system early in April. And from what I've heard, it's working well.

Why is this not happening beyond islands like NBA arenas? TBH the overall tech sector’s effort in this area seems lackluster, at least compared to the much-hyped race for contact-tracing tech.

BTW, this is how we imagined the post-Covid office looking back in the depths of the pandemic. We got much of it right.

And when everyone’s a unicorn…

2021 has already seen the birth of 221 unicorns — nearly double the 118 unicorns that made the list in 2020. 

As the global unicorn club gallops closer to 1,000, check out our map of the world's 728 private companies valued at $1B+.

Making a splash

From launching new payments products to inking partnerships with legacy names, big tech is transforming fintech. 

We analyze the strategies of Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon in this $28.2T market here.

The real MVP

Medical devices leaders are shifting more of their R&D budgets toward transformational innovation. Need an adoption playbook?

We evaluate 10 tech markets — including point-of-care testing and smartphone-based diagnostics — that medical device OEMs should monitor, vet, and prioritize in this client-only report.

1. Virtual assistants in retail banking & payments
2. Security, fraud, KYC & AML for banking & payments
3. Core platforms and APIs for banking & payments
4. Digital asset custody in capital markets
5. Automation in lending & underwriting
6. Wealth management software

$2T: Microsoft’s market cap surpassed $2T, making it the second public company in the US to reach that mark after Apple. It broke the $1T mark just over 2 years ago. With the pandemic driving digital adoption, big tech outperformed the S&P 500 by more than 30 percentage points in 2020. We analyze tech giants’ recent strategies across the cloud, retail, and more here.

161%: Visa acquired Sweden-based Tink, which provides APIs for open banking services, for $2.15B — an increase of 161% over Tink’s $825M valuation in December 2020. Visa’s planned acquisition of Plaid, another open banking provider, fell through earlier this year. We cover how the API economy is reinventing financial services here.

10 programs: Peter Thiel-backed Atai Life Sciences raised $225M in its IPO. The biotech company has 10 therapeutic programs in the pipeline, 5 of which feature psychedelic compounds like MDMA. However, none have been approved for commercial sale, and the company has not yet generated revenue. We dig into the psychedelic renaissance in our latest Tech Trends report.

100,000 images: Facebook and Michigan State University designed a method to reverse-engineer deepfakes, hyper-realistic doctored images or videos used in disinformation campaigns. The method, which was trained on a set of 100,000 fake images, can detect which generative AI model (if any) created an image in order to more accurately distinguish and trace deepfakes. We survey the state of information warfare — and the techniques driving it — in this report.

1.5B sq. ft.: A new report from CBRE estimates global e-commerce spend will increase by $1.5T in the next 5 years. This will require an additional 1.5B square feet of warehouse space globally — more than twice the area of Manhattan. The explosive growth of e-commerce has led to record funding and massive valuations for e-commerce tech companies. Catch up on the latest trends in e-commerce and other retail tech sectors here.

35%: Researchers at the University of Queensland, Australia, designed a quantum microscope that can achieve 35% more clarity than conventional microscopes, potentially revealing microscopic structures that were previously invisible. The technology could one day bring improvements to applications ranging from medical imaging to navigation.

For some brewers, beer is the new gold. 

Brewers are seeking out forgotten beer in shipwrecks as well as defunct distilleries, with the hope that the yeast strains could improve today’s beers. 

Yeast diversification could benefit not only the brewing industry but also food production, pharmaceuticals, and more.

Have a great rest of the week.

Marcelo

P.S. We're hiring a Senior IT Ops Engineer. Apply here.