MGMT Boston - W3, Q4 24 - Cyvl / Dana Louie, InvoiceCloud / Last Week on The Lantern
Cyvl / Dana Louie, InvoiceCloud / Last Week on The Lantern
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 1,060+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Cyvl - a hardware enabled software platform building the “easy button for public works departments”
Dana Louie, Director of Strategic Programs @ InvoiceCloud - a thinker, builder, strategist, advocate, and most importantly operator
The Lantern Last Week: Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Jason Lavender, Electives / Productize Yourself
The Lantern is brought to you by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan this September
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 80+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
The Lantern Short Form Video Series (YT / IG) - Intro Trailer / Jonathan Chang, Markit AI / Aniketh Mohanty, Wayfair / Setting the Culture / Amber Nigam, basys.ai / The Agents Are Coming / Alex Ewing, OneScreen.ai / Jess Lynch, FoundersEdge / What is MGMT Boston? And Why? / Remen Okoruwa, Propexo / Amelia Van Camp, Mirakl / Simon Taylor, HYCU / Nathan Rosenberg & Marc Printz, Farmblox / Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Jason Lavender, Electives
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch (evolving list)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Sense, mabl, Customers.ai, Wicket, Form Health, EnFi, Crunchtime, OfferFit
Q3 + Q4 Operators Highlighted: Greg Montemurro / Posh, Susan Roth / Quantified AI, Jason Jones / Klaviyo, Haley Wilcox / ezCater, Peter George / MX, Laura Andre, Qunett
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 Q1 Recap / 2024 Q2 Recap / 2024 Q3 Recap
Cyvl
Founders: Noah Budris, Noah Parker, Daniel Pelaez
Founding: 2021
Mission: Accelerate the future of infrastructure
Employees: 25 & 100% Local
Workplace: Onsite
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $10M raised
Investors: Companyon Ventures, Argon Ventures, AeroX Ventures, Alumni Ventures, MassVentures, Launch Capital, RiverPark Ventures, Launchpad Venture Group, and Hub Angels
Key Customers: Collier Engineering Co., Civiltech Solutions, Horrocks, Environmental Partners, The LiRo Group
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $20M – $75M (assuming average dilution from the 2024 $6M 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!
Cyvl is a hardware enabled software platform building the “easy button for public works departments”. This growth stage startup is changing the roadmap, quite literally, of our towns and cities so that local governments and municipalities can make better decisions about how to allocate their resources and build better infrastructure.
Daniel Pelaez needed a summer job. After his freshman year at WPI he didn’t land an electrical engineering internship so he answered an urgent “help wanted” ad in his local newspaper at the Southbury Public Works department on their road crew. Daniel showed up at sunrise for his first assignment. The plan? Everyone drive around and find things that are broken. There were some shorthand priority lists and calls from residents to answer but no system of record in sight. It was pretty eye opening!
At WPI, Daniel studied robotics and self-driving technology as the cost of sensors (LiDAR specifically) really began to come down with production scaling and computer vision technology becoming more commercially viable. He never forgot about his experience at Southbury Public Works.
Our infrastructure is aging. If it were a student, well it would be near academic probation. America’s infrastructure is a C- according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The roads? They receive a D grade (src). Not exactly honor society level. In 2021 President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2T infrastructure bill, for projects across the country. The bill specifically includes $100B+ for rebuilding roads and bridges (src).Those are significant funds to hire civil engineering firms to do citywide audits and hire people to drive & walk around with clipboards to survey our roads and infrastructure before any roads get paved.
Roads are how we get to work, school, access hospitals, and enjoy our time. Without strong core infrastructure, our lives are negatively affected. Every town has a data problem, struggling to reconcile the physical world and digital domain. Public works departments face challenges maintaining their workforce in the years ahead (src).
What if we could use sensors & computer vision to help cities & towns like Southbury make better infrastructure decisions and maintain institutional knowledge?
Daniel and his roommate, Noah Budris, started talking to tons of prospective customers while at WPI. They would skip class and drive to public works departments at 6am to chat with the road crews before work and listen to their problems. Soon joined by classmate Noah Parker, the trio set out to build a hardware enabled software platform for public works.
Once you digitize your infrastructure, it becomes easier to manage and maintain through software. Making decisions about infrastructure is hard enough, Cyvl aspires to make that data more transparent to empower the department of public works officials. By creating a more transparent infrastructure ecosystem, more maintenance and building can happen faster. The team sends their sensors to towns and cities (often in partnership with a civil engineering firm) to digitally survey the roads. They’ll process all that visual data and crunch 3D maps using computer vision algorithms to understand the defects in the roadways based on civil engineering standards. Their team uses the latest research & technology in LiDAR, visual mapping, and GPS to build an integrated solution that makes sense for governments.
Cyvl’s platform collects the data, processes it using AI (which is their true differentiator), and then analyzes it to help governments make better decisions. Cyvl’s vision to build the Easy Button for public works departments and their roadways, helping accelerate all aspects required for building and maintaining physical infrastructure.
Road assessments are historically expensive and Cyvl is enabling towns and cities to do them more often due to the ease & reduced costs of data collection. Today, Cyvl’s platform maps roads - the largest asset (50%+) within transportation infrastructure - and will pursue opportunities over time to capture bridges, sidewalks, water & sewer, tunnels, rail infrastructure, power lines, and even trees. Basically, everything a city needs to operate its budgets and keep systems functional. There are other future opportunities to integrate satellite imagery, integrate self driving car company data, or even package delivery fleets to create & enrich ongoing roadway data too.
From their first $500 pilot in 2021, Cyvl is now signing seven figure contracts with cities and has dozens of customers. The team recently surpassed seven figures of ARR as they grow into a category leader. As cities see success, neighboring cities have begun adopting more quickly.
Cyvl is racing to close out 2024 on a strong note, in final negotiations with two of the largest cities in the U.S., to drive continued momentum into 2025. They have 30+ sensors currently deployed and have scaled from mapping 100s of miles per week to 1000s of miles per week, continuing to scale out their data collection & infrastructure.
In April of 2024 they raised a $6M Series A led by Companyon Ventures and hired a number of key players, including Dan McCarthy to lead their Product team. In the coming months they’ll be looking to add a VP of Sales and continue to scale their team across Engineering and other functions. It’s always about the team!
Operators to Know:
Alex Ball, Full Stack Engineer
David Corsi, Manufacturing Process Engineer
Shannon Cunnane, Founding Customer Success Manager
Jonathan Fisher, Mapping Analyst
Jeff Greim, Sales Manager
PJ Mara, Robotics Engineer
Fernando Mazzoni, Data Scientist
Dan McCarthy, VP of Product
John Pignato, Software Engineer, Infrastructure (DevOps)
Likith Ponnanna, Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Emma Shechtman, Marketing Manager
Tanya West, Sales Manager
Samantha Yi, Operations Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Cyvl 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 milestones for Cyvl as we head toward 2025?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 25 employees?
How is Cyvl planning to go to market in 2025 as it enters the growth stage?
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 Cyvl you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more cities & local governments into the digital age. All citizens applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Dana Louie, Director of Strategic Programs @ InvoiceCloud
Dana Louie is a thinker, builder, strategist, advocate, and most importantly operator. She previously sat in between HubSpot’s multivariate growth ambitions and its sprawling SMB ecosystem and is now serving as the Director of Strategic Programs at InvoiceCloud.
Dana hails from Colorado Springs and moved to the East Coast to attend Wesleyan, where she was a distance runner. She credits her success at rapidly growing companies to the high energy, commitment, and grit she learned as an athlete.
Her parents - an engineer dad and artist and teacher mom - helped her develop a strong foundational work ethic, dose of creativity, and analytical approach to problem solving.
She studied Math and Economics at Wesleyan, and through the school’s Quantitative Analysis Center, she was introduced to the economic consulting firm Analysis Group. She joined them upon graduation where she focused on large scale finance and antitrust litigations. Intellectually demanding and analytically rigorous, Analysis Group taught her a lot and provided her the opportunity to work with some awesome female mentors who helped her build and grow her career.
But Dana wanted to break into tech. She applied to business school and attended Harvard Business School in order to parlay her existing analytical skills with general management for a career in Product Management. She interned at Boston-based Indigo in a PM role but found she was more drawn to general management and operations.
Dana joined HubSpot first as part of a rotational program for MBA graduates, acquiring wide exposure to a variety of cross functional experiences within FP&A, Product Management, and Product Operations. She helped on projects like pricing and packaging for a freemium product launch. Unsure what she wanted to do next, she sought a rotation on the Ventures team, HubSpot’s Corporate Venture Capital arm to try something new.
Enjoying the work, Dana joined the team after the rotation and worked broadly across the Corporate Development team in both M&A and Ventures. Dana raced to come up to speed and threw herself headfirst into diligence work and writing investment memos (shout out to Hightouch the first investment she led). Through her time on the team, she learned to think creatively about the intersection of HubSpot’s existing product roadmap and future needs. Both an investor and a strategist, much of Dana’s time focused on planning and executing a corporate development strategy, including understanding the key areas for investment at HubSpot.
Seeking to move toward a high-impact operator role, Dana joined InvoiceCloud as their Director of Strategic Programs soon after the company had been taken private in a private equity buyout in January of 2024. InvoiceCloud is a leading provider of digital payment, customer engagement, and outbound disbursement solutions. At InvoiceCloud Dana is reporting to their CEO and focused on executing strategic initiatives to enable growth and efficiency.
Dana helps lead a variety of initiatives to make the company more valuable, leveraging playbooks from the company’s investors, her own experience, and the support network around the company. She helps oversee the planning around cross functional strategic projects plus the tracking of progress against their goals. This can be anything from Go-to-Market initiatives to improve sales productivity, to People and Talent Development initiatives to build on the company culture. It’s a balancing act of holding in mind the high-level strategic objectives and the nuts-and-bolts tactical plans to get there. In her own words, Dana derives energy and enjoyment from taking a company goal, breaking it down into a plan, and working with teams to accomplish the milestones to get there. At InvoiceCloud she gets to do that at a fast clip given the pace of growth.
In addition, Dana has Chief of Staff-like duties, including running weekly executive team meetings, monthly All Hands company meetings, board meeting prep and even offsite planning to help support the executive team.
She loves anchoring her career and life here in Boston. Dana has optimized for The Hub coming out of graduate school to be close to family, friends, and its talented ecosystem of builders. We’re lucky to have you!
Executing a Strategy - Negotiation, Getting Buy-In, and Driving Alignment
The scrappy distance runner who ran a few extra miles to pivot from corporate development to InvoiceCloud has learned that “everything in life is a negotiation.” She’s not just talking about deal terms. Everything she’s done - from consulting to venture investing and even now in her work at InvoiceCloud - has been tied to creating value and seeing how much of it makes sense to capture and share. Framing goals and obtaining buy-in is a critical part of that process.
To Dana, success comes from having a plan and doing what you say you are going to do. Having a clear analytical approach helps drive alignment for Dana and her teams as they make strategic decisions.
Career Insights / Learnings
Advocating for Yourself - “I’ve found that working hard only gets you so far. Knowing what you want and using your voice to get there is critical to successful career growth.”
Aligning Your Values - “What do you want from your career experiences and how do you plan on living your life? If you want to build a life that balances ambition, health, family, and friends, aligning your career to match those personal goals and career ambitions is a must.”
Finding Your Fit - “I’ve been in positions where I felt I had to change who I was to succeed. For example, I’m a naturally extroverted person who likes to make friends with my counterparts, but I’ve been in high-stakes negotiation roles where ‘being kind and relatable’ was seen as a downside. Big surprise, that wasn’t the right role for me! Figuring out your true strengths and finding a team that will appreciate you for them will allow you to thrive.”
Dana loves the interplay of strategy and operational execution in her role and career. Whether it’s at InvoiceCloud or elsewhere she aspires to a “Head of Strategy” type role in tech. She’d also love to one day teach others, perhaps as a business school professor, leading a fulfilling life inside and outside the workplace.
If you want to learn more about Dana, you can find her getting buy-in for strategic initiatives at InvoiceCloud, running the Boston Marathon next spring, and above all supporting her business partners, family, and friends. Thanks for sharing. Excited to see the trails you blaze across the Boston tech ecosystem in the years ahead!
The Lantern: Jason Lavender, Electives / Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Productize Yourself
The Lantern is brought to you by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan
Last week on The Lantern..
Jason Lavender teaches us about “Getting out of the building” as the Electives team transforms corporate training:
Jenni Goodman shares her learnings building community at Underscore and the founders they’re looking to meet in the Boston community:
Services are popular now?!? Well, you might as well productize yourself:
The Lantern - a short form video series by MGMT Boston featuring the best startups (+founders), ecosystem leaders, and ferociously talented operators in Boston
W5: Simon Taylor, HYCU / Nathan Rosenberg & Marc Printz, Farmblox
W4: Remen Okoruwa, Propexo / Amelia Van Camp, Mirakl
W3: Alex Ewing, OneScreen / Jess Lynch, FoundersEdge / What is MGMT Boston? And Why?
W2: Aniketh Mohanty, Wayfair / Amber Nigam, Basys.ai / W2 Summary (The Agents are Coming)
W1: Trailer Launch / Markit AI / W1 Summary (Setting the Culture)
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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