MGMT Boston - W11, Q2 25 - H2Ok Innovations / Coworking Chronicles, Downtown Boston Pt 1
H2Ok Innovations / Coworking Chronicles, Downtown Boston Pt 1
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help thousands of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups, founders, and local operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
H2Ok Innovations - building a sensor enabled AI platform to help factories, especially in food and beverage, run faster
Thanks to Jeff Bussgang from Flybridge for the intro
The Coworking Chronicles: Summer Highlight Series with Rho - come share what you’re building this summer. We’ll be in the Back Bay on Newbury St. this week (Thurs, June 12th from 12pm - 2pm at Exeter & Newbury)
Thank you to Justin Wolz & the Rho team for the partnership
On The Lantern..
Downtown Boston, Part 1 - EnFi, Inc, OnRamp, Circle, Nooks, and LinkSquares were some of the startups we heard about on this trip to the neighborhood!
Downtown Boston, Part 2 - coming Thursday!
Around the Hub on MGMT Boston’s News Feed:
Occupier raises $16M in growth capital from Unbundled Capital
Robotics Tech Week, June 9th - June 13th by Cybernetix Ventures 🤖
Datalign Advisory launches GEOs, helping advisors identify underserved consumers
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 100+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
2025 Boston Tech Big Board - 2025 Startup Directory + Startups to Watch
Powered by RevenueBase
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Highlighted Startups: Tines, Civic Roundtable, AceUp, Pentera, TruLeague, Glimpse, Datalign Advisory
Q2 Highlighted Operators: Subash Rajaseelan / Thinkverse, Nathan Teplow / Salsify
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 1H Recap / 2024 2H Recap
H2Ok Innovations
Founders: Annie Lu & David Lu
Founding: 2021
Mission: Unlock operational potential with precision automation
Employees: 24+ & 90%+ Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $11.2M raised
Investors: 2048 Ventures, 1517 Fund, Flybridge, Construct Capital, Techstars, Uptake Alliance
Key Customers: Coca Cola, Unilever, AB InBev, Danone, Mitsubishi, Ben & Jerry’s, Hellman’s
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $50M+ (assuming average equity dilution in the Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
H2Ok Innovations is building a sensor enabled AI platform to help factories, especially in food and beverage, run faster. This team is bringing 21st century technology to an industry built on 20th century technology - switches, timers, and valves - pulling factories into an AI forward era. Sometimes..you have to go back to your roots to invent the future.
Co-Founders and siblings Annie Lu & David Lu were born into a generational manufacturing family. They grew up running around factory floors in Asia visiting their relatives each summer. When other kids went to camp, Annie & David were climbing distillation towers, running gas chromatography tests, and learning firsthand how these plants operated. Their family specifically ran process manufacturing factories, turning fine chemicals into finished products, across industries like brewing, building materials, pharmaceuticals, and more.
Most of us are familiar with discrete manufacturing, where components are assembled for products like the iPhone or your favorite sneakers made halfway across the world. Process manufacturing, on the other hand, brings a set of raw materials through a production process and recipe to produce a finished product in an under-digitized industry.
Manufacturing is a multi-trillion dollar market and process manufacturing represents ~30-40% of that total footprint (src). COVID-19, as we all know, highlighted the vulnerabilities of global supply chains and the need to get smarter about re-shoring our manufacturing. From the baby formula crisis to chip shortages to other production disruptions, there is a need to modernize. Geopolitical risks, aging workforces, tariffs and rising material costs are additional tailwinds that provide opportunities for innovators who can increase productivity and help cut costs.
Investors like to talk a lot about founder-market fit. When it comes to process manufacturing, Annie & David might as well have been made in a factory! David studied chemistry & computer science at Brown, working at university & national labs and even interned at Boeing. Annie studied Economics & Computer Science at Harvard before dropping out to tackle this massive opportunity.
Ok, so how does this all work?
Process manufacturers today often rely on rigid, hard-coded systems. Valves open and close on pre-set timers. Processes are completed via the same steps, every time, regardless of external conditions. Maybe the temperature is different on Monday. Or there are variabilities in the raw materials on Tuesday. Or there’s drift in machinery performance on Wednesday. H2Ok is pioneering “precision automation” to bring dynamic code, real-time decision making, and flexible operations that respond to actual conditions instead of assumptions. Processes should be run only until they’re done, not on a static timer like a dishwasher that almost always wastes time and utilities.
H2Ok’s proprietary light-based spectral sensor - imagine a high-tech “eye” inside a pipe - reads fluid chemistry in real time and is easy to install across diverse environments. Instead of sampling and lab-testing every few hours, factories get a continuous stream of precise liquid signature data. The company’s patented Edge AI models interpret the data, optimize operations on the fly, and close the loop with the factory’s control systems to return time back thus making, factories highly efficient by increasing their production uptime.
They have built this technology platform to fit into a wide range of manufacturing environments retrofitted into existing workflows. This technology turns “brownfield” facilities into “greenfield” state of the art operations, without heavy lifting. H2Ok drives measurable improvements for process manufacturers that include fewer wasted materials, more flexible & sustainable operations, and less downtime for their enterprise customer base.
Analogous to the development cycle of autonomous vehicles, H2Ok leverages increasingly cost efficient sensors with powerful on-device compute and real-time models to revolutionize process manufacturing. McKinsey & Microsoft’s biggest customers…are H2Ok’s customers.
H2Ok is already working with some of the world’s largest manufacturers like AB InBev, Unilever, Pepsico, Coca-Cola, and Danone. This growth stage startup currently serves dozens of enterprise customers in hundreds of facilities on every continent except Antarctica. At this rate, they may be Arctic bound in due time..
Unilever's Chief Supply Officer shared that the H2Ok platform drove a 20% reduction in cleaning downtime with 20% water and energy savings, improving asset utilization by over 100bps with a <1 year payback. That’s winning project finance. AB InBev has used H2Ok to reduce chemical usage by 15-30%, 16-31% water use reduction, and 10% less cleaning time. They’re one of the “top bets” at the company scaling across their global manufacturing base. Oh and they’re working with one of the world’s largest (unnamed) hyperscaler datacenters to help deliver more efficient cooling techniques.
H2Ok remains rooted in Boston, as a growing team of 20+, focused on building out their Somerville HQ alongside a distributed workforce of talented employees. Over the balance of 2025 and into 2026 they’re focused on global expansion, delivering more value to their existing customers, and continuing to sell into large, multi-national enterprises. Process makes perfect!
Operators to Know:
Karin Bloom, Head of Operations
Aidan Brown, Applications Engineer
Derek Coppola, Head of Sales
Hu Dou, Senior Software Engineer
Timothy Dorn, Mechanical Engineer
Khaled Karmen, Senior Software Engineer & Developer Team Lead
Edward Liu, Software Engineering Manager
Brody Lustberg, Applications Engineer
Anurag Mitra, Software Engineer
Sanjay Rajan, Head of GTM
Joseph Sanchez, Hardware Engineering Manager
Patrick Wright, Data Scientist
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the H2Ok team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key 2025 milestones for H2Ok?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 25 employees?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about H2Ok you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more process manufacturers into the age of AI. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around town!
The Summer Coworking Chronicles: Downtown Boston, Part 1
Downtown Boston & the Financial District is home to public companies like Klaviyo, growth stage companies like Jellyfish, CloudZero, ezCater, LinkSquares, Paperless Parts, and many more.
EnFi, Inc, OnRamp, Circle, Nooks, and LinkSquares were some of the startups we heard about on this trip to the neighborhood.
📈 Steve Travaglini, Co-Founder & CEO at winrate shares..
As a longtime financial district operator and the former CRO at LinkSquares, it’s about the community & camaraderie - restaurants (the lunch walk & lunch break). And the after work spots too of course!
Steve thinks we should be watching out for OnRamp (onboarding software) and Nooks (power dialer, parallel dialer in GTM tech)
💱 Emmett Shipman, Fintech Strategy and Growth Senior Manager at Wolf & Company, P.C. shares..
From his work at MassChallenge to Alloy Labs (and now Wolf), Emmett has seen a lot of evolution in the FinTech space. He’s watching Circle (and the growing stablecoin space) as well as EnFi, Inc (shout out Joshua Summers, Scott Weller, Chris Aronis & team!)
Thanks to our guests and the ones to come for sharing their perspectives & insights!
We were in Kendall Square last week (got some great content!) and Back Bay is up next for Thursday (see below). The MGMT Boston summer tour continues!
The Summer Coworking Chronicles: Back Bay Up Next
It’s going to be a startup summer here in Boston.
📣 This week? We’ll be in the Back Bay on Thursday, June 12th from 12pm - 2pm 📣
What startup are you building?
What do you love about building startups in Boston?
What are the best startup(s) in Boston we should know about?
You answer the questions. We’ll blast it out!
MGMT Boston is partnering with Rho, the business banking and spend management platform built for founders and finance teams, to find out what startups are being built in each neighborhood around Boston this summer.
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups, founders, or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt