Diamond: Swarmer
Napoleon is reported to have been a big fan of lucky generals, and he may well have given an approving nod to Ukrainian defence tech start-up Swarmer.
The developer of autonomous drone software was supposed to list on Nasdaq in January but delays caused by the US government shutdown and questions from the securities & exchange commission pushed back its IPO to March 17. Meanwhile the US and Israel attacked Iran, which responded by lobbing Shahed drones all over the Middle East, and all of a sudden a company with a track record of blasting these drones out of the sky started to look distinctly useful.
Swarmer priced its IPO at $5, and the share price promptly rocketed to more than $50, giving it a market capitalisation north of $650m.
Last year’s decision by the US federal communications commission to stick foreign-made drones on its list of equipment that threatens national security has created a surge of interest in domestic manufacturers, but the beauty of Swarmer’s software is that it can work on any hardware platform.
It has been tested at the sharpest of sharp ends in Ukraine, flying more than 100,000 real-world combat missions in an environment that is quite literally life or death.
This is clearly more conducive to rapid product development than the usual lumbering pace of military procurement, and Swarmer chair Erik Prince — founder of private military company Blackwater — is hinting at a significant new product release in the near future. Its software already allows one operator to control as many as 690 drones at once, and it’s playing a key role in fighting off the Russian bear.
PRINT HEAD: Heads on the Block
Dog: Atlassian
The headline writers have been having a high old time with the sell-off of software-as-a-service companies, with “SaaSpocalypse” fighting it out with “SaaSaccre” en route to what may or may not end up as “SaaSmageddon”.
Many of these former high-fliers have been hammered on fears that their clients will desert them because such AI products as Claude will enable them to design software themselves, and few have got more of a vigorous hammering than the former darling of Australia’s tech sector, Atlassian.
The company is the worst performer on the Nasdaq 100 this year, and its market capitalisation, which was standing tall at $116bn five years ago, has shrunk to a mere $20bn.
Tall is definitely a word that can be used to describe Atlassian’s shiny new HQ, commissioned back in the glory days and set to be the world’s tallest hybrid timber skyscraper on completion this year. Many a seasoned observer of the markets has pointed to a major office upgrade as representing a screaming sell signal, and they would certainly have been right on this occasion.
As recently as last month co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes was bullish about the prospects of what he described as a “bloody great business”, but his tone was a little more subdued last week when he announced that 10% of its staff would be heading for the exit.
The pruning was relatively modest compared with that announced by payments company Block in February, when it let go nearly half its 10,000 staff on the grounds that AI would be able to automate a lot of the work that mere humans had been doing.