Way too many companies took PPP money when they didn't need it. It was a shitty implementation of a worthwhile program. As long as you had a banking relationship and applied quickly, you got money. MAny small businesses that needed the money were left behind.
The edge VERI has is building an "operating system" for AI to be deployed in different areas and actual scale in an emerging industry with a lot of small "one-off"application providers. VERI focuses on unstructured data, and much of what they do is within the advertising/marketing space. Think reams of digital video and audio data.They even have their own digital advertising agency. That whole side of the business is going to suffer in the downturn.
Their Pandologic acquisition makes mass hiring programs more efficient. Largest customer is Amazon. I think Walmart is using it too. Another that will take a hit, but large seasonal employers will still need to hire efficiently.
New business verticals in distributed energy (utility scale production and trading), and governmental programs (kind of a blank check where many are grabbing initial pilot dollars). I am looking for confirmation of their "Land and expand" sales model. TECO is in pilot on their solar energy production. Street has been waiting for an expansion announcement that has not come yet. Murebini doing a pilot for energy trading. I saw PR stating their technology learned grid demand market prediction in days and outperformed industry providers.
Lots of other possibilities including their metaverse stuff. But that's just gravy.
C3.ai is Tom Siebel's company doing AI on top of enterprise software platforms to make the systems predictive. Another name that has been slammed, and i will probably own that one at some point soon.
These companies are trading like they are going out of business instead of the high gross margin, emerging tech companies with oodles of cash that they are.
