Hola,
 

The price of dogecoin has surged nearly 14,000% this year. 

Alongside this year’s NFT weirdness, including the “Nyan Cat” meme auctioning for $600K, maybe it should not be shocking to see a meme-based cryptocurrency with a $70B+ market cap.

Shopping spree

Funding to retail tech companies jumped to $28.9B in Q1’21, a 60% increase from the previous quarter.

From e-commerce to meal & grocery delivery, we look at global retail technology investment trends, top deals, and more here. 

Banking on fintech

Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and JPMorgan are investing in fintech to future-proof their businesses.

We visualize how they have built their fintech portfolios over the last 10 years here.

Meeting of the minds

In addition to great content (speakers include The Hartford, Google, and Travelers), CB Insights Tech Market: Digitizing P&C (May 13-14) will serve as a virtual marketplace connecting insurers and emerging tech vendors.
 

For a little preview of what’s to come, check out these 4 companies that will be in attendance:

• Carpe Data — provides industry-changing claims automation technology, small commercial insurers with advanced classification, risk characteristics, and predictive scores
• Corvus — provides commercial insurance products built on advanced data science, with an AI-driven approach to empowering brokers and policyholders to better predict and prevent loss
• Nearmap — captures current, high-resolution imagery and property insights across 90M residential and commercial parcels in the US, giving insurers access to truth on the ground
• Kasko2go — provides solutions and the future of technology to insurers, drivers, and distributors

The pharmacist is in

Getting prescriptions to patients is challenging and medication adherence is low, driving unnecessary health expenditure. 

We analyze digital pharmacy companies bringing medication management to the home in this client-only ESP Vendor Assessment Matrix.

+14,000%: The price of dogecoin, the meme-based cryptocurrency, reached 69 cents — a nearly 14,000% increase year-to-date. The coin’s price has surged in anticipation of Elon Musk hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend. Before that airs, dig into our report on 8 industries being disrupted by Elon Musk.

52%: SafetyCulture, which offers safety solutions for workplaces, became a unicorn after raising $73M at a $1.6B valuation. We predicted SafetyCulture would hit the $1B+ mark in our 2020 Future Unicorns report, made in collaboration with Fast Company. So far, we have a 52% unicorn hit rate (including exits).

-16%: Telehealth utilization in the US fell 16% from January to February, according to Fair Health. Telehealth usage is still elevated compared to pre-pandemic levels, but it’s unclear to what extent the trend will stick in the long term. We talk through the telehealth opportunity post-Covid here.

$8.1B: Amazon posted its Q1’21 results, with net income up 224% year-over-year to $8.1B. Amazon’s disruptive ambitions extend far beyond retail — see which industries it's eyeing next here.

5M acres: Manufacturing company Valmont acquired Tel Aviv-based Prospera, which uses AI to help farmers boost crop yields, for $300M. The 2 companies previously partnered to monitor 5M acres of land, roughly equivalent to the area of Wales. Prospera is one of 3 agricultural AI companies selected to our recent AI 100 list.

Have a great rest of the week.

Marcelo

P.S. See how NTT Data uses a data-driven approach to partner with leading startups here.