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TransferWise.
billion-dollar valuation in under five years.
Prosper, Funding Circle, and LendingTree are three examples in a market expected to grow from $26.16 billion in 2015 to $897.85 billion by 2024.
Smart Finance Group.
Created in 2013 to serve China’s massive unbanked and underbanked population, Smart Finance uses an AI to comb a user’s personal data—social media data, smartphone data, educational and employment history, etc.—to generate a reliable credit score nearly instantly. With this method, they can approve a peer-to-peer loan in under eight seconds, including microloans to the unbanked. And the res...
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robo-advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment
All robo-advisors have done is make the process available to the customer, and save the customer money as a result.
As of January 2019, Wealthfront had $11 billion under management, while Betterment was at $14 billion.
India recalled 86 percent of its cash. Vietnam wants retail to be 90 percent cashless by 2020. Sweden, where over 80 percent of all transactions are digital, is almost there.
Real Estate
of two familiar players—big banks and big insurance—plunged the country into chaos.
eXp Realty,
VirBELA (which eXp now owns).
Sanford, meanwhile, attributes at least $100 million of his company’s $650 million market cap to money saved via reduced infrastructure and overhead.
Pile on what’s coming: AI, 3-D printing, autonomous cars, aerial taxis, and floating cities, and everything changes fast.
the real estate broker.
Zillow, Trulia, Move, Redfin, and many other companies have invested millions in the technology.
Web clickstream data, satellite imaging, geolocation tracking, etc. And like the AI arms race in other industries, in real estate too, the companies with the best data will end up dominating the market.
why not let the convergence of AI, VR, and sensors become your broker?
estate search—home, apartment, office, whatever—will be conducted from your couch, via a VR headset, with the help of your personal AI.
“Location, location, location” is the real estate mantra, but there’s an important addition to this story: “Proximity, proximity, proximity.”
But over the next decade, with the transportation transformation that’s coming, we’re changing the relationship between here and there.
driverless cars, flying cars, and the Hyperloop make proximity a possibility for all?
Enter: floating cities.
Oceanix City, a zero-waste, energy-positive design by Tahitian entrepreneurs Marc Collins
and Itai Madamombe. It consists of a series of hexagonal islands arranged in a circle, with each of these self-sustaining 4.5-acre platforms able to house three hundred people, with the complete 75-acre property capable of sustaining up to ten thousand.
A second design by the San Francisco–based Seasteading Institute is being tested in the waters off French Polynesia. Known as the Floating Island Project, the idea here is less a floating city and more a test platform for the designs of future floating cities. With a hundred acres of beachfront property and a special economic z...
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In both locations, sustainability is key. Water capture technologies provide drinking water; an array of greenhouses, vertical farms, and fish farms supply the food; and sunlight, wind power, and wave energy power the whole lot. Electric boats, or soon, autonomous flying cars, will zoom inhabitants to work on the mainland. Or, more importantly, maybe not. With drone delivery...
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Exponential technology is dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing nearly eve...
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we’re seeing a drastic shift in both the skylines of cities and the business of business.
solar-powered photosynthesis.
The Bill Gates–backed RIPE Project at the University of Illinois has matched and improved those numbers.
IKEA, for example, now feeds customers in their stores with food grown vertically in their stores.
the Bay Area–based Plenty Unlimited Inc. With over $200 million in funding,
It also produces yields 350 times greater than outdoor farmland, and uses less than 1 percent as much water. And rather than bespoke veggies for the wealthy few, Plenty’s processes allow them to knock 20 to 35 percent off the costs of traditional grocery stores. To date, Plenty has their flagship operation in South San Francisco; a one-hundred-thousand-square-foot farm in Kent, Washington; an indoor farm in the United Arab Emirates; and they have started construction on over three hundred farms in China.
AeroFarms has figured out how to grow over 2 million pounds of leafy greens a year with neither sun nor soil. Instead, inside their facility, rows of AI-controlled LEDs provide the exact wavelength of light each plant needs to thrive.
but the Silicon Valley–based Iron Ox has designed a thousand-pound robot that can tote around eight-hundred-pound
By 2050, to feed a population of 9 billion, the world will need 70 percent more food than it did in 2009. A lot of that food will be meat. By 2050, primarily thanks to the modernization of China and India, global meat consumption is expected to increase by 76 percent. This is problematic, to say the least.
Today, 50 percent of all habitable land on Earth is used for agriculture, with 80 percent of that land reserved for livestock. A quarter of the planet’s available landmass is currently used to keep 20 billion chickens, 1.5 billion cattle, and 1 billion sheep alive—that is, until we can kill and eat them.
Meat production accounts for 70 percent of global water use.
14.5 percent of all greenhouse gases
The core of the issue is the same: inefficiency.
Here’s the cultured meat formula. Take a few stem cells from a live animal, typically via a biopsy so the animal isn’t harmed. Feed these cells a nutrient-rich solution. Power the whole process in bioreactors. Give the industry a few years to mature and the technology a few years to shed costs and, finally, we can produce an infinite number of steaks to feed an increasingly carnivorous population.
As of today, the nutrient-rich solution remains animal-based and riotously expensive.
be entirely plant-derived, which scientists and companies ar...
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like raw hamburger or chorizo—than
Eventually, bioreactors will require less power and/or could run completely off renewables, but we’re not there yet.
Cultured meat uses 99 percent less land, 82 to 96 percent less water, and produces 78 to 96 percent less greenhouse gases.
By 2018, Memphis Meats had gotten that down to $2,400 a pound, while Aleph Farms has steak down to around $50 a pound.
and in higher end Asian restaurants, lab-grown chicken is already on the menu.
