MGMT Boston - W2, Q2 25 - Civic Roundtable / Simon Taylor, HYCU / Adaptive Ready & Penny Finance
Civic Roundtable / Simon Taylor, HYCU / Adaptive Ready & Penny Finance on The Lantern
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:
Civic Roundtable - building a collaboration engine for government, helping make the public sector more integrated and effective
Thanks to Tyler Kirk for the intro
Simon Taylor, Founder & CEO at HYCU (we’ll be spotlighting the HYCU team in April!) - HYCU is the world's #1 leader in SaaS data protection and this startup has a vision to be the world leader in AI data protection too!
On The Lantern..
Ethan Pierce, Founder & CEO at Adaptive Reader - translating books into 30+ languages and taking Frankenstein from an 11th grade level to an 8th grade level to a 5th grade level based on reading level
Thanks to Kristen Craft for the intro
Crissi Cole, Founder & CEO at Penny Finance - building a financial planning software company for people who don’t have millions of dollars (which is most of America)
Thanks to Jess Lynch for the intro
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4/16 - Operators Club April Meet Up: Operators reach out to me if you’d like to join!
5/5 - Consumer Happy Hour with Curate Capital & Fidelity Private Shares
Around the Hub on MGMT Boston’s News Feed:
Layer Health raises a $21M Series A to use AI for medical chart review
MIT books $12B+ Air Force contract with Lincoln Lab R&D Center
Plex Research partners with Ginkgo Bioworks on AI drug discovery
Harvard 2025 Innovation Finalists / MBA Startupathon with MIT & Harvard
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Simon Taylor, Founder & CEO at HYCU
HYCU is the world's #1 leader in SaaS data protection. And today this startup has a vision to be the world leader in AI data protection too!
MGMT Boston is thrilled to be spotlighting HYCU - one of Boston’s top startups throughout this month of April - in conversations with different members of their leadership team.
First up? Founder and CEO Simon Taylor joins us to share his vision, what's happening this spring, some wisdom, and how we can grow the Boston tech ecosystem together!
👀 What is the vision for 2025 at HYCU? 👀
This is THE year when HYCU becomes the world’s #1 leader in SaaS data protection, serving thousands of customers across an ecosystem of 30,000+ SaaS applications.
HYCU has 86 SaaS integrations and has been thinking deeply about what to do with the world of Generative AI. AI is really about the data lake, taking multiple sources of data, and combining them in new, different & better ways. HYCU is thrilled to announce they are going to become the world’s #1 leader in AI recovery.
Their team will make it easy to have your data is protected, no matter what data lake you’re using, ingesting, or what you want to do with your data.
🔍 What’s going on inside HYCU this spring of 2025? 🔎
2025 kicked off with HYCU signing the Dell Extended Technologies (ETC) Partnership. Today there are 3,000 Dell sellers across the world actively incorporating HYCU into their offering and marketing their platform.
HYCU has built a strong partnership with iManage, one of the leading content management platforms in the legal space. HYCU Is the world’s first and only backup provider for all of iManage.
What started as this idea to have all these SaaS integration and their own marketplace is slowly becoming a snowball where more and more SaaS companies are coming to HYCU and asking for their help with backup & recovery.
Because of their relationship with Anthropic and others, they can help any SaaS company quickly get to market with a true end-to-end data protection platform that is industrial grade for the enterprise, government , and more.
Simon's message for his team? 2025 is go time! It’s time to move!
🤔 What has Simon learned from more recently building HYCU? 🤔
Understanding the true impact of empathy. At HYCU they believe that relationships are ultimately what wins. If you view your customers and partners through the lens of an empathic relationship, that will endure over the long term.
🤝 How can we help? 🤝
Boston is still underserved by Silicon Valley. HYCU has been fortunate to work with Enrique Salem at Bain Capital and Theresia Gouw at Acrew Capital. Not every Boston venture has that opportunity!
We need more press about Boston, to understand where Boston rocks (cybersecurity, data, data science, data protection, etc.). We’ve got the best feeder systems in the world with MIT, Harvard, and 300 other schools. We need to bring the investment community to us and work harder to build a true Boston technology ecosystem!
Civic Roundtable
Founders: Austin Boral, Joshua Seiden & Madeleine Smith
Founding: 2022
Mission: To power a more effective and integrated government
Employees: 14 & ~20% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $5M raised
Investors: General Catalyst
Key Customers: Arizona, New Jersey, Oregon
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming average equity dilution in the $5M Seed 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!
Civic Roundtable is building a collaboration engine for government, helping make the public sector more integrated and effective. This seed stage team is building the Google for government - a modern operating system that helps public sector teams work smarter, faster, and more efficiently across agencies to get things done.
Madeleine Smith & Joshua Seiden were colleagues and jet setters. They traveled from sea to shining sea helping law enforcement agencies improve operational efficiency and response capabilities as employees of Mark43. They saw government agencies struggle to communicate across departments, let alone state lines. Through phone calls, email threads, and outdated legacy systems government workers struggled to access information.
Madeleine headed off to Harvard Business School where she met classmate Austin Boral. They bonded over a shared passion for public service and, over dinner at the finest Mexican institution in the Greater Boston area - Felipe’s - hatched a plan to solve the problem of government communication once and for all. It could have been Cirque du Soleil for the government, Austin was all in!
Local government spending is $1T+ (src) and there are more than 90,000 government agencies & entities employing 22.5M+ people (src). Ok, let’s be real these numbers are in flux in the era of DOGE but you get the point. There are a ton of people, resources, and complexity when it comes to federal, state, and local government coordination.
Our government is running on 1980s technology, endless paper forms, and monstrous custom-build projects that take years and millions of dollars to deploy. Why? There’s no single place to quickly ask “who should I talk to about veteran homelessness in my county?” or “what grants are available for parks & recreation right now?” Government workers on the front lines need more modern, flexible, and easier tools to use. “Who’s working on attracting technology companies to Massachusetts and keeping talent here?” Wouldn’t we like to know!
Austin, Josh & Madeleine would meet up in 2022, in a half empty co-working space in Hartford between NYC & Boston, to whiteboard their MVP. They set out to build a platform designed to bring enterprise-grade workflow, data search, and knowledge-sharing tools to the public sector without the multi-year deployment cycles of traditional government software.
Think of Civic Roundtable as an enterprise software platform that consolidates institutional knowledge, like a secure ‘Google’ for government entities, unlocking otherwise siloed information. On the frontline, this translates into less time stumbling around trying to find information and more time delivering value to American taxpayers. Agencies at the federal, state, and local level use Civic Roundtable to gather real-time data for better reporting, tracking, and transparency.
How does it work in practice?
The state of Arizona is confronting extreme heat and appointed a “Heat Czar” to orchestrate everything from shipping-container cooling centers to emergency partnerships with local businesses. Over 5,000 stakeholders rely on Civic Roundtable to track supply availability, share policy updates, and deliver resources to vulnerable groups as temperatures soar.
The state of New Jersey is on a five-year mission to end veteran homelessness. Thousands of people - from the state’s homelessness prevention unit to housing authorities - log into Civic Roundtable daily to see exactly who is doing what, where the resources are, and how to coordinate in real-time.
Civic Roundtable is helping solve meaty problems with technology. Their integration (API) network continues to expand, pulling data from countless third-party tools, so government workers can search across every file, old website, and random folder with a single query. Civic Roundtable is also building better analytics, visualizing “who’s working with who” across agencies, creating a real-time org chart of cross-department relationships and competencies.
They even help agency workers draft policy documents with sources pre-cited and auto-redaction capabilities. AI driven tools allow their customers to automate simple workflows and save people a ton of time.
In 2024 Civic Roundtable raised a $5M Seed round led by General Catalyst and established their initial customer base. The team more than tripled their customer count, currently serve 600+ cities and counties, have multiple seven figure contracts, and touch a population of 70M+ people nationwide.
In 2025 they are eager to see what scale can look like. The team will be looking to grow their GTM team beyond Founder led sales, add to their engineering team, and bring on a Chief-of-Staff type resource. They were recently named one of Fast Company’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies and their NPS has jumped more than 15 points in 6 months. For any civic minded builders, they are always open to connecting with mission-driven folks looking to help modernize government technology here in Boston (and beyond)!
Operators to Know:
Emily Benz, Deployments
Alden Quimby, Head of Engineering
Sanjana Rao, Senior Software Engineer
Alex Stein, Head of Product
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Civic Roundtable team I know I missed some up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming in the months ahead!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the critical company milestones for 2025?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 15 employees?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // functional areas that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Civic Roundtable you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more government agencies into the age of AI. All citizens applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Ethan Pierce, Founder & CEO at Adaptive Reader
Ethan Pierce, Founder & CEO joins to discuss how Adaptive Reader built a technology where you can upload a book once and then generate leveled reading adaptions. Adaptive Reader can take Frankenstein from an 11th grade level to an 8th grade level to a 5th grade level as well as translate books into 30+ languages. Only 4% of readers globally can read at a high school level in English. 54% of American adults can’t read above a 6th grade level. This is an epidemic literacy issue!
Crissi Cole, Founder & CEO at Penny Finance
Crissi Cole, Founder & CEO at Penny Finance joins The Lantern to discuss the financial planning software company she’s building for people who don’t have millions of dollars (which is most of America) and have largely been ignored by the advisory industry. Their focus this spring? Partnerships, partnerships, partnerships!
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