Amazon

With the smart speaker market still comfortably in its youth, and voice as a computing interface just beginning to take hold, no one is sure what the best use cases for the technology are, or what the device that best…

Legislation and infrastructure are two of the biggest hurdles facing the unmanned aircraft industry. An Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) system is an important solution. With nearly 30 years of experience in the Aviation sector over his career at the Department of…

In December, Apple will ship HomePod, a smart speaker with a unique focus on music. Don’t be fooled, however, by HomePod’s music-focused marketing; Apple has a grander vision than delivering a better sounding Echo. The company is making Siri a…

AI is one of the core themes on which we focus at Loup Ventures. And as analysts, we heard Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple emphasizing their focus on AI over the last several years. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has commented…

Special thanks to Austin Bohlig for his work on this note.  Amazon’s 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems was the spark that ignited the Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGV) industry, which we believe will represent a $10B market by 2025. We’ve taken a…

Written by guest author Lindsay Boyajian at Conductor Since Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods, the running joke across social media has been, “Jeff Bezos said to Alexa, ‘Buy me something on Whole Foods,’ and Alexa bought Whole Foods.” This quip highlights the…

We recently published a six-part series on the future of robotics including a detailed outlook through 2025 on the five major robotics categories: Industrial, Commercial, Domestic, Military, and Social. Each part highlighted our thesis, outlook and market size for each category of robotics hardware, but…

The most important lesson from Uber’s travails is that bad culture doesn’t scale. Talented teams with bad culture can build fantastic businesses, but not businesses that last. A unicorn with bad culture is a unicorn with a bomb strapped to its back…

Earlier today, Amazon announced that it has agreed to buy Whole Foods for $13.7B, supercharging Amazon’s food effort. The market for groceries is roughly $500B, of which Amazon will immediately own $15B. Amazon is expected to do a total of…

It’s no secret that online retail is slowly killing offline retail.  In Q4 2016, 8.3% of total US retail sales were online (about $103 billion), up from 5.1% just five years ago (about $53 billion). Offline sales were 91.7% of…

The importance of voice assistants in the screenless future is hard to overestimate. We see speech-driven user interfaces as a key component of the next computing paradigm, so it’s helpful to understand empirically where each platform stands today. In February, we compared…

Amazon’s Q1 earnings call last night sounded somewhat similar to Google’s call just an hour earlier, highlighting a lot of the same AI and machine learning investment themes.  Jeff Bezos discussed increasing leverage of AI and machine learning to drive operational efficiencies…