MGMT Boston - W2, Q3 25 - Liquid AI
Liquid AI / Summer Coworking Chronicles Catch Up
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:
Liquid AI - building a different kind of foundational model AI company…and perhaps the only foundational model startup on the East Coast
The Coworking Chronicles: Summer Highlight Series with Rho - get caught up on our neighborhood stops before the tour resumes on Thursday in the Back Bay!
Thank you to Justin Wolz & the Rho team for the partnership
UPCOMING EVENT:
July 9th: Ditch The Deck with Jess Lynch & Greg Raiz from FoundersEdge
July 24th: The Art of Prompting: Conversations with AI co-hosted by C10 Labs, Innospark, The Changemakers, and MGMT Boston (for active operators, founders & investors)
Around the Hub on MGMT Boston’s News Feed:
Remark raises $16M to build out human-powered expert models for e-commerce
Alexander Ng and Rebecca Patterson launch JoyFi to help couples with their finances
Emily Knight appears on The Lantern to talk about Tough Tech Week (Oct 27th - 31st)
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, H2Ok Innovations, Lila Sciences
Q2 Highlighted Operators: Subash Rajaseelan / Thinkverse, Nathan Teplow / Salsify
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 1H Recap / 2024 2H Recap
The Summer Coworking Chronicles: Catch Up
Thanks to our guests and the ones to come for sharing their perspectives & insights!
The Coworking Chronicles Startup Summer…
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 around Boston neighborhoods this summer.
Liquid AI
Founders: Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Alexander Amini, and Daniela Rus
Founding: 2023
Mission: Driving the next generation of AI adoption from architecture to inference
Employees: 50 & 40% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $293M raised
Investors: Link Ventures, AMD Ventures, OSS Capital, Safar Capital, and others
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $2B+ (assuming average equity dilution in the $250M 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!
Liquid AI is building a different kind of foundational model AI company. Spun out of MIT CSAIL, its four founders - Ramin Hasani, Mathias Lechner, Alexander Amini, and Daniela Rus - started Liquid AI with the mission of building state-of-the-art, general-purpose AI systems that are capable, efficient, highly aligned, and trustworthy.
In the summer of 2025, it’s important you know about (perhaps) the only broad based AI foundational model startup being built on the East Coast…right here in Boston.
Liquid AI’s models use a non-transformer, Liquid Foundation Model architecture. What that means is greater flexibility, better performance, and lower cost models relative to their transformer driven competitors. Put simply? Liquid Foundation Models should scale better.
In January 2025 the team released LFM-7B (Liquid Foundation Model - 7B parameters) which was best in class for its size when released for local deployment, latency-bound, and cost-constrained tasks with multiple languages supported.
The Liquid team released the Hyena Edge family of models in April 2025 designed specifically for smartphones and edge devices. Its performance surpassed standard transformer benchmarks in computational efficiency and language modeling quality, with lower latency and a smaller memory footprint. This makes Liquid Hyena architecture ideal for real-time applications on mobile hardware (benchmarked on the Samsung S24 Ultra phone).
The startup hasn’t named key customers yet but has active use cases across automotive, e-commerce, consumer electronics, financial services, and life sciences. Liquid’s models helped an automotive manufacturer deploy a local model and lower costs by 70% through reducing cloud dependency.
In June 2025, Liquid AI entered a strategic partnership with G42, a leading technology group based in Abu Dhabi to deliver private, local, and efficient AI solutions for enterprises. This collaboration focuses on deploying generative AI powered by Liquid Foundation Models (LFMs) for on-premise and sovereign use cases, particularly in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Global South.
In December 2024 Liquid AI raised $250 million in Series A funding led by AMD Ventures a year after launching with ~$37M in Seed funding. Their partnership with AMD leverages AMD Instinct GPUs, CPUs, and NPUs to accelerate model training and inference for edge and enterprise deployments.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Darian Bhathena, Product Development Engineer
Saniya Karwa, Member of Technical Staff
Ian Meyer, Life Sciences Go-To-Market and Product
Alex Quach, ML Engineer/Scientist
Kelly Robinson, Executive Business Partner
Tim Seyde, Staff ML Scientist
Alay Shah, Member of Technical Staff
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Liquid AI 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:
How is Liquid AI competing with the marquee foundational model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.?
What are the ideal use cases today? What verticals are most promising over the next 6-12 months?
What are the key milestones for 2025 and 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 Liquid AI you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more enterprises into the age of AI. All of us Bostonians applaud your efforts. See you around town!
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