MGMT Boston - W4, Q4 24 - Modulate / Sarah Clarkson, Vestmark / Last Week on The Lantern
Modulate / Sarah Clarkson, Vestmark / Last Week on The Lantern
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 1,070+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Modulate - building AI tools for a better, safer online experience. Their audio technology platform, beginning with the gaming industry, uses AI to monitor millions of voice interactions for toxicity
Sarah Clarkson, Staff Innovation Product Manager @ Vestmark - a FinTech product leader who has cultivated a rigorous research process throughout her career, validating her learnings & choices along her professional journey
The Lantern Last Week: Daniel Pelaez, Cyvl / Sean Smith, Denim / The Market Is Getting Better
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) - Intro Trailer / Simon Taylor, HYCU / Nathan Rosenberg & Marc Printz, Farmblox / Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Jason Lavender, Electives / Daniel Pelaez, Cyvl / Sean Smith, Denim
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch (evolving list)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Cyvl
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Laura Andre / Qunett, Dana Louie / InvoiceCloud
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 Q1 Recap / 2024 Q2 Recap / 2024 Q3 Recap
Modulate
Founders: Carter Huffman, Mike Pappas
Founding: 2017
Mission: Create safer and more inclusive online spaces
Employees: 50 & 80% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $36M raised
Investors: Lakestar, Everblue Management, Hyperplane Ventures
Key Customers: Activision, Rec Room, Rockstar Games, Trass Games, Schell Games
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $100M - $300M (assuming average equity dilution in the $30M 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!
Modulate is building AI tools for a better, safer online experience. Their audio technology platform, beginning with the gaming industry, uses AI to monitor millions of voice interactions for toxicity. Now, this growth stage startup is expanding their use cases to enable better online communities and safer products across the digital consumer landscape.
Modulate’s story begins on the MIT campus. Co-Founder & CTO Carter Huffman stood in a brightly lit hallway facing a whiteboard. He was determined to solve a six line physics equation when suddenly a looming figure came up behind him, blocking out the light of the corridor. It was Mike Pappas, Modulate’s Co-Founder & CEO. Looking down at the whiteboard, Mike said “I think you’re missing a ‘-’ sign on line three”. The equation was solved. Modulate was born.
Oh come on! This isn’t the movies! But it was the start of an enduring friendship built on a mathematical foundation. After MIT, Carter went off to NASA to work in their Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and Mike went to work in Finance at Bridgewater Associates before joining Boston based startup Lola.
They stayed in touch to discuss the evolution of machine learning & adversarial networks, in particular how these new technologies could be applied to media. It turns out physics and developing audio algorithms are closely linked from a tools perspective if you’re into waveforms, spectral analysis, digital signal processing, and that sort of thing.
Carter & Mike felt that there would be some important audio applications to be built using new AI research in the same way that visual & natural language research was being commercialized. Modulate was born to build these initial voice applications.
The duo built “voice skins” to manipulate someone’s voice when they talked. The gaming industry thought it was really cool. But it wasn’t their top priority. Still, their technology impressed and they had built some strong industry relationships. The feedback they kept receiving was “could you use this technology to help identify & stop harassment on our gaming network(s)?
The video game industry is massive. It’s over $200B globally, $40B+ in the U.S., and still growing by double digit percentages annually. There are also more than 3B gamers worldwide (src). 100s of millions of people play video games that have a social component each month. Unfortunately, a small fraction of those users (<5%) exhibit toxic behavior. That small minority has a massively outsized impact on the gaming communities. Especially for newer gamers, they often churn once they are exposed to toxicity .
The Modulate team set out to solve this problem using audio algorithms to create safer gaming communities. Because even a partial solution could have a large scale impact. Taking their machine learning capabilities, they built ToxMod.
ToxMod is the only proactive voice chat moderation solution purpose-built for games and designed with player safety & privacy in mind. It can reduce the exposure of toxic behavior by 50% or more which increases retention. Their biggest competitor? The status quo (aka doing nothing).
The product triages voice chat to flag bad behavior, analyzes the nuances of each conversation to determine toxicity, and enables moderators to quickly respond to each incident by supplying relevant and accurate context. Then they refine & tune their system further for each individual customer so it gets better as it learns.
Over the pandemic the team really found their footing and, soon after hitting $1M in ARR, raised their $30M Series A (Q3 2022). The team has proven out product market fit and grown the team to 35+. Modulate is the industry leader in voice moderation for gaming, available in 18 languages and counting.
Now, Modulate is expanding their use cases to other industries that have voice as a part of their platforms. Their tools work well with social media platforms, meetup platforms or last mile delivery & rideshare platforms. Any communication network has the ability to integrate Modulate. There’s still plenty of growth in unmoderated gaming ahead too.
In addition to moderation, there is a wealth of existing data Modulate can leverage to build new products. Fraud and cheating is an ongoing concern in gaming that can be better mitigated by Modulate’s tools. They can also help model prosocial behaviors like rewarding users for good behavior. Or even share valuable feedback with gaming developers when gamers are having trouble in various parts of the game.
ToxMod’s pricing model is based on volume of content processed, today working with some of the biggest names in the industry like Call of Duty (Activision) and Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games) with several more flagship names to be announced before the end of 2024.
Modulate is gearing up for a big 2025 and has moderated over 160 million hours of voice data to date. They’ve helped customers take 80 million + moderator actions against harassment and toxicity to date. That’s real action! Predominantly based in Boston, they are backed by Lakestar, Everblue Management, and Hyperplane Ventures.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Pranil Bhavsar, Senior Cloud Engineer
Corin Buchanan Howland, Director of Engineering
Sandrine Chavy, Director of People Ops
Terry Chen, Chief Operating Officer
Nathan Crafts, VP of Sales
Miranda Dukach, Senior BizOps and Strategy Manager
Mark Frumkin, Director of Account Management
Malik H., Full Stack Software Engineering Manager
Ken M., Director of Product
Rachel Manzelli, Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Zachary Neveu, Core Engineering Team Lead
Mark Nolan, Director of Marketing
Mike Tom, Marketing Manager
Amanda Yip, Director of Finance
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Modulate team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming soon! Get in touch with Modulate anyways.
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the company’s strategic goals for 2025?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 50 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 Modulate you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more gaming companies into a healthier, more positive AI age. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Sarah Clarkson, Staff Innovation Product Manager @ Vestmark
Sarah Clarkson is a FinTech product leader who has cultivated a rigorous research process throughout her career, validating her learnings & choices along her professional journey. Today she is the Staff Innovation Product Manager at FinTech growth company Vestmark.
Growing up locally, Sarah was an avid tennis player, picked up ice hockey, and was an accomplished student. Sarah decided to attend Wellesley College after a chance visit during her sophomore year of high school, where she was captivated by the culture and its focus on empowering 'women who will.' Majoring in Biology and minoring in Art History, Sarah planned to attend medical school. She got deep into the sciences, shadowing different positions during her undergraduate studies & internships. After her graduation, she became a researcher at Brigham & Women’s to prepare for medical school.
Ever the researcher, Sarah explored the day-to-day of a medical profession while at Brigham and Women’s, and ultimately decided her interest lay outside of practicing medicine. Seeing how labs were run, on the other hand, piqued her interest on the business side of healthcare. She joined a clinical research center called the Baim Institute for Clinical Research on their Business Development team helping bring in new partners.
Next, she went to Reify Health for her first “for profit” experience. Reify built software for clinical trial pre-screening to help hospitals organize their datasets for patients they wanted to screen that was previously done using spreadsheets & sticky notes.
Looking to advance her career through graduate studies, Sarah explored various paths by speaking with professionals holding PhDs, MPHs, and MBAs. Ultimately, she chose to pursue an MBA, recognizing that its focus on management and business would equip her with the skills needed to unlock future opportunities in the next phase of her career.
At an MIT Sloan prospective students event for women, Sarah felt an immediate sense of belonging and alignment with the school's commitment to fostering inclusive, forward-thinking leaders. She was thrilled with the opportunity to attend the following fall. Eager to explore new opportunities, she spent her summer as a Product Management intern at EverQuote, where she discovered her interest in product development and accepted a return offer for after graduation. From there, Sarah joined Cogo Labs, a Cambridge-based incubator, where she worked on the launch of a FinTech product and led an early-stage team developing a blockchain product.
Sarah then transitioned, with a team of colleagues from Cogo, to join Vestmark. Sarah is responsible for launching new products for Vestmark, a well established late stage growth financial technology company. Her team works on incubating new products to diversify Vestmark’s product portfolio and increase market share.
Research = Door Knocking
Throughout her career, Sarah has learned that knocking on doors and connecting with different people allows for an informed decision making process for her future.
With each ‘coffee chat’ Sarah learned that to make the connection stress-free the key was to focus on the questions she would like to better understand as the target outcome. At every career junction, she spoke with people in the industry about their experiences - doctors before medical school, alums from graduate school programs, and folks at potential companies. Using a consistent format, she tweaked her questions, took notes, and built on each conversation.
For research and relationship building, she’s built a diligent process. And if you’re out there thinking about the next step in your career, Sarah is always happy to pay it forward when someone reaches out.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Learning Drives Momentum - “Learning is a big driver for me, both personally and professionally. Always staying curious and not being afraid to ask questions to help follow that curiosity has helped career transitions and professional growth.”
Team Trust - “I’ve learned to value strong relationships with mutual respect over the course of my career. Whether it’s comfort sharing feedback on ideas, or knowing each member is accountable, a team that has established trust produces amazing results.”
Navigating Ambiguity - “Being comfortable in ambiguous situations but also being able to eliminate ambiguity for members of your team is an important balance. You have to balance ambiguity for team agility with creating a shared reality for target execution.”
Sarah wants to continue building things with awesome teams. When she thinks about the long term, she wants to continue to grow her product career and strives to be in a position to foster and drive DEI impact. Until then, she’ll continue to hold the door open behind her and give opportunities where she can through volunteering and non-profit work.
If you want to learn more about Sarah you can find her playing racket sports around Boston, walking her dog along the Charles with her partner, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see all of the relationships, research, and products you build in the coming years!
The Lantern: Daniel Pelaez, Cyvl/ Sean Smith, Denim / The Market is Getting Better
The Lantern is brought to you by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan
Last week on The Lantern..
Daniel Pelaez tells us about his journey building Cyvl, a software enabled hardware platform building “the easy button for public works departments”:
Sean Smith talks about his career as a Product leader, building and selling across functions:
Good news! The market is getting better. Here is why this cycle is a bit different:
The Lantern - a short form video series by MGMT Boston featuring the best startups (+founders), ecosystem leaders, and ferociously talented operators in Boston
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See you next week!
-Matt