Late fall and early winter are generally heavy times for investing conferences, and 2023 has been no different. The 2023 Think Equity Conference was held in October in New York City. The annual conference is a showcase of emerging growth companies from around the globe, and this year, it featured over 75 publicly traded and privately held companies across many sectors. Here are five of the best ideas from this year's Think Equity Conference.
Beamr Imaging
Beamr (BMR) provides video encoding, transcoding and optimization solutions via its suite of video compression software encoder solutions. The company just went public at the end of February, although its stock has been highly volatile this year, recording amore than 170% gain in a single day in May after chipmaker NVIDIA (NVDA) featured it in a presentation.
Beamr's solutions enable customers to transform their videos into "smaller, faster, lower-cost versions of themselves without compromising quality." The company also states that customers can save up to 30% on cloud storage and bandwidth by slashing the bitrate and file size of their videos by up to 50%.
In short, Beamr touts its software as cutting customers' content delivery network costs while making their videos upload, download and arrive faster. The company said its Beamr 5 software development kit drives Netflix, ViacomCBS and other top video distributors, adding that it won an Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering for its Content-Adaptive video encoding technology.
DarioHealth
DarioHealth (DRIO) is a digital health company operating in the U.S., Canada, the European Union, and Australia and New Zealand. It offers a user-centric digital therapeutics platform for patients with multiple chronic conditions. DarioHealth also offers a suite of other personalized solutions, including one-on-one coaching for conditions like diabetes, weight management, hypertension, chronic musculoskeletal pain and behavioral health.
The company's offerings aim to make it easier for patients to manage multiple chronic conditions through continuous, connected support. Dario's solutions are designed to anticipate patients' needs, understand their motivations, and simplify behavior changes, with the goal of placing better health and improved outcomes within the reach of every patient.
The company continuously validates and enhances its solutions through ongoing research and insights, participating in 40 clinical studies so far. For example, according to DarioHealth, high-risk patients using a digital diabetes management platform for two years typically see an eA1C reduction of around 1.4%.
In another study, patients with hypertension observed an average 38% reduction in blood pressure by stage one. Dario also listed many additional clinical studies on patients using digital tools to manage various chronic conditions, including some studies on the benefits of using a single solution for chronic comorbid conditions.
Lantern Pharma
Lantern Pharma (LTRN) is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on using artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and genomic data to streamline drug development. The company is developing LP-300 as a combination therapy for non-small cell lung cancer in patients who have never smoked.
Lantern Pharma's pipeline also includes LP=184 for recurrent advanced solid tumors, LP-284 for recurrent non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, and ADC for select solid tumors. LP-184 and LP-284 have received orphan designations and are currently in Phase 1 trials, while LP-300 is currently in Phase 3 trials.
Lantern's Response Algorithm for Drug Positioning and Rescue (RADR) drug-development platform is powered by AI and designed to support the "process of developing, rescuing and revitalizing targeted compounds" to treat cancer and personalize cancer treatments. RADR is primarily used to predict the potential response patients will have to Lantern's drugs and other drugs being reviewed and analyzed by Lantern.
Permex Petroleum
Permex Petroleum (OILCD) is a junior oil and gas company focused on combining low-cost production of oil and natural gas assets for sustainable growth with blue-sky projects for scale in Texas and New Mexico. Specifically, the company's assets and operations are focused on the well-known oil-and-gas-producing area called the Permian Basin in West Texas and in New Mexico's Delaware Sub-Basin.
Permex owns and operates more than 78 oil and gas wells and owns royalty interest in over 73 wells. It also owns over 11.700 acres of held-by-production oil and gas assets in Texas and New Mexico and owns 17 saltwater disposal wells.
The Metals Company
The Metals Company (TMC) states that it is developing "the world's largest estimated resource of metals required for electric vehicles and low-carbon energy." Its mission is described as "to build a carefully managed metal commons that will be used, recovered and reused again and again."
The Metals Company's products include metals for batteries, which it collects from polymetallic nodules. These nodules contain four essential metals used in EV batteries: cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese. The company is also scaling its onshore processing systems to supply lower-impact metals to the global EV industry.
It aims to prevent the need to keep taking metal from the planet, enabling the same metal to be reused over and over again for thousands of years. Eliminating metal mining should halt the damage caused to our planet by such operations and keep metal from being lost to global landfills.
The company does admit that achieving its goal of establishing an endlessly reusable metal commons "will be tricky." However, it also noted that the world is transitioning to a future of decarbonized energy and transport, and all those carbon-free systems will require billions of tons of metal to build. Additionally, the growing global population will continue to grow and build, also requiring billions of tons of metal for those efforts as well.
Investing in emerging growth companies
Given the rapid rise of growth stocks, it's no surprise that investors are always on the lookout for emerging growth companies. In recent years, growth stocks in general have recorded impressive returns, as evidenced by the S&P 500 Growth Index's explosion over the last five years.
The index has added 1,000 points over that period, rising from around 1,635 at the end of October 2018 to about 2,693 at the end of October 2023. This year alone, the S&P 500 Growth Index has added more than 300 points, rising from around 2,361 at the end of December 2022 to 2,693 at the end of October 2023.
Of course, the earlier investors can get into a potential growth stock, the greater their returns could be. However, with the possibility of great returns typically comes significant risk. Thus, investors are always advised to do their due diligence before investing in any stock, whether it's a potential emerging growth name or not.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
Ari Zoldan
Ari Zoldan is the CEO of New York-based Quantum Media Group, LLC. The company provides investor relations, public relations and equity research services to publicly traded companies. As an on-air media personality, Ari can be seen regularly on major media outlets and is frequently quoted in mainstream news outlets covering business, innovation and emerging trends.
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