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TLDR:
2023 2H Recap
Companies
Operators
Q3: Alexa Murray // WHOOP, Kieran O’Driscoll // AtScale, Max Milhan // Twilio, Ries McQuillan // Vested, Dave Barron // HubSpot, Sam Richard // ngrok, Ben Katz // Appex, Wyatt Bramhall // Perch, Pablo Bello // Product Leader, Joe Haftel // Paperless Parts
Q4: Danielle Pedra // GTM Leader, Natalie Cantave // Estateably, Luciana Marzilli Lord // Repsly, Andrew Dickson // SevenRooms, Lucy Driscoll // 10Beauty, Alan McKinnon // Jellyfish, Gina Guarracino // Mirakl & Angela Gatta // Enspira
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front (more Operators Club Corner content coming in 2024!)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Procurement Sciences AI, HYCU, Givzey, LogRocket, Stockpress, Mandrel, Nasuni, SportsVisio, OrbisPay
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Danielle Pedra // Delegate, Natalie Cantave // Estateably, Luciana Marzilli Lord // Repsly, Andrew Dickson // SevenRooms, Lucy Driscoll // 10Beauty, Gina Guarracino // Mirakl, Alan McKinnon // Jellyfish, Angela Gatta // Enspira
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q3 Startups & Operators Highlighted
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
2H 2023 Highlighted Startups
Snyk
Here is what Snyk has been up to the past few months:
AppSec Product: Released AppRisk Essentials, an industry-first solution designed to empower application security teams with a comprehensive ASPM workbench needed to govern & scale their security programs
Reviewpad Acquisition: Marking Snyk’s 9th acquisition, ReviewPad is a solution that allows developers to safely contribute to any codebase as fast as possible to further DevSecOps collaboration
Risk-based Prioritization: Introduced Risk Score and AI-driven code security intelligence, Insights, enabling organizations to focus on addressing high-priority risks effectively
Snyk AI Code Report: Released its inaugural AI Code Report that found a cognitive dissonance among developers with 56.4% saying insecure AI suggestions are common, but few have changed processes to improve AI security
Open Source Software Security Report: Released its 2023 SoOSS Report that explores the adoption of security tools + practices and discusses the impact of automation in software development
Expanded Leadership Team: Announced new additions to the leadership bench with Jonaki Egenolf as CMO, Myke Lyons as CISO, David Morris as General Counsel and Michael Durso as SVP, Sales, Americas
SentinelOne & ServiceNow Integrations: New integrations with SentinelOne to enhance cloud security and the first software composition analysis integration (SCA) for ServiceNow
Industry Recognition: Ranked #19 on the Forbes Cloud 100, recognition in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Application Security Testing, the 2023 Gartner Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice for Application Security Testing and The Forrester Wave™: Software Composition Analysis, Q2 2023 report.
FeatureByte
In the past six months, Boston AI startup FeatureByte has launched two new product offerings, expanded its team, and joined a prominent AI accelerator. In August, the company launched the FeatureByte Self-Service Feature Platform, which simplifies and automates the entire feature lifecycle to help enterprises scale AI across their organizations. In September, it unveiled FeatureByte Copilot, which automatically ideates use-case specific features for data scientists. And in October, FeatureByte hired Roy Ballard as an Account Director. Finally, the company was recently selected as one of 10 startups for Comcast NBC Universal’s LIFT Labs, an enterprise AI accelerator, which had hundreds of applicants. Startups in the LIFT Labs program will work alongside leaders from Comcast to explore advancements in AI for large-scale businesses.
Neural Magic
We've been busy at work trying to support best-in-class open-source LLMs like Llama2 and Mistral. We just released support for Llama2, making it much faster and even more accurate... without GPUs.
Notable Systems
Notable Systems, Steve Johnson & team are heads down building the future of intelligent data extraction to help automate manual tasks. Steve recently spoke at Northeastern’s Leading with Responsible AI conference in October. Outside of work, Steve helped publish a documentary series called Never Let Him Go which was released on Hulu in September. It’s a powerful story about the decades long search for justice for his brother Scott Johnson and for all of Sydney's LGBTIQ victims who have yet to receive justice.
Akooda
Since August, Akooda has significantly advanced its position as a noteworthy player in the AI-powered Enterprise Search field. Substantial progress has been made in enhancing our technology to meet the needs of the modern enterprise with advanced and proprietary AI, NLP, and ML technology advancements. Complemented by strategic hires in key roles to fortify the team for upcoming challenges, we're thrilled to report our best financial quarter, marked by a robust sales pipeline and a 48% growth compared to Q3. Major industry leaders, such as Atlassian, Google, Walmart, P&G, FujiFilm, Miro, and others, have taken notice of our achievements, underscoring our growing influence in the sector.
Posh AI
Posh AI soars in a transformative year for AI, powering client success and shaping the future of banking. Generative AI exploded, democratizing access and igniting industry adoption. Amidst this rapid evolution, Posh embraced innovation, launching Posh Knowledge Assistant and significantly enhancing our Voice and Digital solutions. We updated our Content Studio, enabling clients with a no-code environment to manage their AI. We empowered clients with deeper insights into how their customers interacted with AI and ensured compliance with SOC 2 Type 2 and CSA Star Level 2. Our team grew 37%, spanning 27 states and three Canadian provinces. We welcomed 33 new clients, who saved millions and delivered over 7 million moments of helpful banking moments.
Propify > Propexo
Things at Propexo have been on a tear in the past 6 months! Since June, we have added over $200k ARR. We processed over 250M records in the last 30 days through our API. Customers are quickly seeing the value by scaling their integration footprint across many PMS systems within weeks of the first integration. On the product side, we now support integrations across 8 of the largest property management software systems and support customers across the full property management lifecycle. Additionally, we are beginning to build solutions for in-house dev teams at vertically integrated property management companies.
Klaviyo
In September, Klaviyo went public on the NYSE, marking the first SaaS IPO since 2021. Prior to its debut, Klaviyo announced the launch of Klaviyo Customer Data Platform (CDP), with advanced analytics to help businesses better understand their audiences and performance. In addition, the company hired Jamie Domenici, formerly of GoTo, as its first Chief Marketing Officer, leading all global strategic marketing initiatives. Most recently, the company announced that over Black Friday Cyber Monday, Klaviyo helped customers like Spanx, Good American and Ouai message over 11 million customers per minute and generate almost $60M of Klaviyo Attributed Value (KAV) per hour at peak times.
UptimeHealth
In 2023, UptimeHealth experienced significant growth, marking a milestone year in our journey. The company has grown revenue by over 250% YoY and has inked deals with clients and partners in the Fortune 500. Our commitment to revolutionizing equipment management for outpatient healthcare providers has led to notable advancements in asset tracking, expenditure optimization, and efficiency enhancement. As part of this effort, UptimeHealth developed and launched a Universal Device Hub in 2023, allowing any medical manufacturer to integrate their equipment into our platform to ensure maximum quality and automate the dispatch of service vendors when the equipment senses a problem. The introduction of our data-driven solutions, including a comprehensive device management system, advanced analytics, and a robust technician marketplace, has been instrumental in our success. This year, we've deepened our impact by helping healthcare professionals save time, money, and stress, all while enhancing compliance and operational transparency. As we look forward to 2024, we're excited to continue this trajectory, driving innovation and providing exceptional service to our customers.
Scroobious
Scroobious had another banner year. They hired a Head of Engineering, launched the Scroobious Ambassador Program with 5 City Leads, brought on new sponsors like Fox Rothschild & Inspiralia, updated their pricing to be even more inclusive of their great communities, and Founder & CEO Allison Byers even helped write & testify for California legislation that was passed into law (BA 54). The team hosted some great events including an origin story dinner with JPM in Boston and they are working on another bill like BA54 in Massachusetts. Lily Macomber, their first employee, was recently promoted to Director of Partnerships & Community. Scroobious’ monthly newsletters are a great place to keep in touch with everything else the team is working on.
PredictionStrike
PredictionStrike finished 2023 with another record year, completing $80M in lifetime transactions and growing to 190k users. Next year we are excited to continue growing our userbase and further engaging the users we already have. It’s a bit too early to announce them now, but we have some really exciting features on the way next year that will be absolute gamechangers.
Benchling
In September Benchling unveiled its new platform for lab instrument connectivity and data management, Benchling Connect, at Benchtalk, the company’s annual customer event. With Benchling Connect, R&D organizations automate time-consuming, manual lab instrument data collection and consolidate the management of experimental data and metadata all on a centralized platform. At launch, Benchling Connect supports out-of-the-box integrations with 12 commonly used instruments. Scientists benefit from a user-friendly, point-and-click interface to streamline connectivity and data management workflows. With Connect, Benchling confronts industry-wide challenges with proliferation of proprietary instrument data models and vendor lock-in by mapping all instrument output to the Allotrope Simple Model (ASM), and making the converter codes open source and freely available on GitHub.
Procurement Sciences AI
Procurement Sciences, a dynamic and innovative company known for its first-of-its-kind AI-powered Bidding Intelligence System for Government Contractors, is wrapping up an impressive year with its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) rapidly approaching the $1 million mark within just one year of product launch. The company’s strategic hiring approach has brought onboard key personnel possessing a perfect blend of industry insights, network connections, and unique talents. As leaders in the field, the team is relentlessly pushing boundaries in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, continuously introducing new features and enhancements to their existing tools in response to ever-changing AI breakthroughs. Looking ahead, Procurement Sciences is gearing up to raise a seed round of $3-$5 million in early Q1, already attracting significant interest from various venture capital firms with deep expertise in Procurement, AI vertical SaaS, and Government Contracting.
HYCU
HYCU now works with over 4,000 customers in 78 countries worldwide, including the Boston Red Sox. The team launched R-Cloud, the industry's first low code development platform to help visualize an entire data estate so that no data is left unprotected, most importantly SaaS Data. CEO Simon Taylor wrote the book "Averting the SaaS Data Apocalpyse” which highlights what the explosion of SaaS data is doing and how, with more than 52% of successful ransomware attacks happening through SaaS applications, if we don't do something soon, well, you get the picture. The company also added a new CRO in Coley Burke and SVP, Global Marketing in Angela Heindl-Schobel, were recognized by Gartner as a Visionary in their annual Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions, and won more than 50 industry awards worldwide including BostInno’s March Madness competition, beating out a number of impressive peers. Busy year.
Givzey
As nonprofit fundraising’s first and only end-to-end gift documentation platform, Boston’s Givzey can definitively say it’s found product-market fit. Givzey combines the best features of e-signature, word processing, PDF, and accounting software into a powerful solution designed specifically for nonprofit fundraising. Just a month ago, Givzey surpassed $1 Million in charitable gifts managed on the platform. Now, not even five weeks later, nonprofit organizations manage $3 Million in gifts with Givzey. Nonprofits use Givzey to send an average of 15 multi-year gift pledges each month and secure hundreds of thousands of dollars through the platform. Users see 72% of gift agreements confirmed within 24 hours of sending, and 92% confirmed within seven days – thanks to Givzey’s automated pledge reminders. The standalone platform is the only solution to use digital gift and pledge agreements to increase bookable revenue and scale multi-year giving to donors at all levels.
LogRocket
Galileo AI was LogRocket’s big release of 2H 2023 which can also be found in this LinkedIn update here.
Stockpress
Stockpress is growing! Now a seven-person team, they’re excited to welcome three new team members: Mauricio Suarez: Director of Sales, Marisol Arenas: Demand Generation Manager, and Marcin Wielgos: Developer. They’re also offering 30% off all annual packages until December 31! The team continues to make changes and updates to the platform based on customer feedback including enhanced share link tracking and customizations, new custom reports, interface optimizations, and more. Coming up for 2024, they’ll launch strategic integrations with Slack, Canva, and BrandGuard and release even more workspace enhancements including:
External upload pages that will allow workspaces to receive files from external users without giving them access to their accounts.
Custom workflows that will allow workspace admins to create complex workflows related to their files including status changes, expiration dates, watermarks on files, and access based on pre-set criteria.
Facial recognition and advanced auto-tagging
Enhanced search opportunities.
Mandrel, Nasuni, SportsVisio & OrbisPay were published right up against the end of 2023 so stay tuned on updates in 2024!
2H 2023 Highlighted Operators
Alexa Murray, Product Manager - Health @ WHOOP
I spent the summer getting reps as a super-operator, at one point overseeing 3 teams, while WHOOP managed a few parental leaves. These teams built some exciting features, including a way to automatically import menstrual cycle data from third party trackers like Clue, Flo, and Apple Cycles, and an innovative goal-setting feature we are rolling out in December.
I have always been bullish on women’s health as a growth lever for WHOOP, and this summer laid out a strategy for how we can win in the space. I am heading into 2024 leading our women’s health efforts, starting close to our core value prop by focusing first on the intersection of high performance and women’s health.
Our team of world-class operators also grew in H2’23 through valuable new hires and the acquisition of AnyQuestion. It is wonderful to see the depth of high-quality tech talent in the Boston area. It is a great time to be an employee and member of WHOOP. We have shipped some amazing features this year and have more to come in 2024!
Kieran O’Driscoll, Director of Business Development @ AtScale
Kieran has become more involved with other aspects of AtScale’s GTM strategy such as Demand Generation, Marketing, and Sales. My focus remains on building out our strategic data platform partnerships, but in parallel, I started working with our Demand Generation team to ensure our messaging is aligned with each partner, collaborated with our marketing team on joint webinars/blogs, and worked with sales to put together package offerings to simplify working with partners in accounts.
Max Milhan, Staff Product Manager @ Twilio
Max Milhan left Rhino in August to join Twilio. After seeing the complicated infrastructure every startup has to build to manage their customer experience and notifications, he's now working on tools for marketers to own that experience and free engineering teams up for other feature development.
Ries McQuillan, Director, Business Development & Growth Operations @ Vested
After completing a recent paternity leave (congrats!), Ries is heads down preparing for 2024. He’s also spending some of his spare time building partnerships as Head of Partnerships for Startup Boston.
Dave Barron, Director of Product Strategy & GTM @ HubSpot
Since August, Dave has been working on HubSpot's acquisition of Clearbit. He will continue to support the integration of Clearbit into HubSpot, working with both companies to enhance HubSpot's AI Powered CRM offering.
Sam Richard, Head of Product Growth @ ngrok
Sam is heads down leading Product Growth at ngrok and also just launched a Maven course for high impact Growth leaders called Product-Led User Journey Mapping and Optimization. For any Growth leaders out there, bookmark this link for the 2nd cohort!
Ben Katz, Portfolio GM Health & Fitness @ Appex
The past three months have been a whirlwind for Fitness at Appex. We're in the final stages of building a net-new men's bodybuilding app that we plan to launch for the new year. As part of this buildout, we have partnered with some of the best trainers in the industry to make this happen, including: David Laid, Lexx Little, The Fagan Twins, James Beardwell, Oliver Forslin, and Anthony Mantello. This is the first net-new fitness app that Appex is bringing to market and we are excited for launch!
Wyatt Bramhall, Lead Product Manager @ Perch
I got married! Professionally, some highlights were..
Released two feature sets for Perch:
International freight booking & consolidation tool which suggests consolidation opportunities and manages communication with our freight forwarders
Automated Amazon replenishments - system which automatically creates inbound shipment plans with Amazon based off of forecasted sales and inventory positioning
Accepted a new job! In the new year, my wife and I will be moving to NYC where I will be joining Primary Venture Partners' incubation arm, Primary Labs, as an Operator-in-Residence focusing on supply chain incubations.
I hope to remain close to the Boston tech scene and plan to be back and forth between cities.
Note: …he’ll be back
Pablo Bello, Product Advisor & Leader
Since MGMT wrote their awesome profile on me, I've started working with Vitrea Health as a Product Advisor and have continued working on DropDot, a claim management automation project catering to SMB Shopify sellers. I've also been talking to a couple of Boston area startups about product management and product leadership roles with the hopes to land a full-time engagement and build something great in 2024.
Joe Haftel, Implementation Manager @ Paperless Parts
I am currently running 11-12 Projects as an Implementation Project Manager here at Paperless Parts. The future looks great for 2024 as the Paperless team is closing in on a huge Product release in Q1 of 2024 for all of our existing and new customers. Currently taking on more project and team lead responsibilities, including helping implement new processes for our team to diagnosis any churned customers and how to best prevent and improve communication both up and downstream from Sales and Marketing all the way to our Product and Engineering team. Looking forward to my next opportunity of growth here at Paperless Parts.
Danielle Pedra, GTM Leader
Danielle is heads down building & gearing up for a big 2024.
Natalie Cantave, Senior Marketing & Partnerships Manager @ Estateably
Promoted to Senior Marketing and Partnerships Manager at Estateably in November 2023.
Executed company rebrand at Estateably in early October -- check out www.estateably.com to view the website
Executed the first-ever MKTG WMN Virtual Summit on December 6th
Launched MKTG WMN TLK podcast for women in marketing
Had 2 speaking opportunities in the month of October -- one with Boston FinTech Week, another with Mass Black Expo by the Black Economic Council of Massachusetts
Luciana Marzilli Lord, Senior Director of Marketing @ Repsly
These last few months have been all about finishing the year off strong, and beginning to plan for 2024. We are leaning into AI for CPG brands and supporting them on their journey as they navigate how this new tech will help them. We're also in the process of growing our team a bit to help us with our 2024 goals! Very excited for the year ahead.
Andrew Dickson, Senior Director of FP&A @ SevenRooms
Over the last couple of months, my main focus has been working across the business to build our operational and financial plans for the upcoming year. The emphasis has been to ensure that the company is growing efficiently, in the right markets and segments with good economics. I did manage to take some time off with my family over Thanksgiving to recharge for the final year end push, which I'm happy to say is now winding down. Aside from that, I've spent some time reflecting on 2023 to understand what my team should be proud of, what we need to improve upon and starting to look ahead to outlining our 2024 FP&A operational goals. Wishing everyone a happy and healthy holiday season and new year!
Lucy Driscoll, Principal Mechanical Engineer @ 10Beauty
Super excited that 10Beauty just brought on my long time mentor, Lisa Surowiec, as our Director of Mechanical Engineering. I’m looking forward to launching “The Ten” in 2024 and am heading to California this holiday season to see my nephew and friends. Also, the Notre Dame Academy Cougars had an awesome qualifying competition last weekend, making it to playoffs and coming in 5 out of 24 teams!! Next one is Jan 13!
Alan McKinnon, Revenue Program Manager @ Jellyfish
I'm currently working with Winning by Design to asses and help develop our GTM strategy for 2024. This includes everything from our sales process, structure, and coaching methodology in the early pipeline stages, through onboarding and upsell motions on the customer side. From a marketing standpoint, we are actively searching for a Head of Product Marketing in case anyone in the MGMT Boston network knows someone who would be a great fit. Overall, excited to take some time to reflect on 2023 over the holidays and looking forward to the new year!
Gina Guarracino // Mirakl & Angela Gatta // Enspira were published right up against the end of 2023 so stay tuned for updates in 2024!
That’s a wrap for 2023.
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt