MGMT Boston - W6, Q1 25 - Matterbeam / Barrett King, Ramp
Matterbeam / Barrett King, Ramp / EnFi & January Ventures on The Lantern
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 1,100+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Matterbeam - an infrastructure software startup ending data pipeline tyranny, freeing data to make enterprises more effective
Thanks to Cort Johnson at AtScale for the intro
Barrett King, Head of Alliances at Ramp - a front of house partnerships leader who builds bridges, tops leaderboards, and fulfills visions through active listening for the world’s leading software enterprises
Thanks to Rob Snyder at Waffle for the intro
On The Lantern..
EnFi hires Chris Aronis - EnFi is an AI platform built to assist lenders in understanding risk. Chris has joined as CRO to scale their commercial efforts!
Thanks to Bridgette Borst Ombres for coordinating
Jen Neundorfer, January Ventures - January Ventures focuses on investing in B2B software bringing legacy industries and processes up the digital curve
Thanks to Jen for participating
Around the Hub...
EVENT (2/19): C10 Labs & MGMT Boston: Buyers & Builders, Maximizing AI Potential
EVENT (2/25): Ditch the Deck Hosted by Greg Raiz & Jess Lynch
EVENT (2/27): Underscore & MGMT Boston: Core Coffee Shop - From Operator to Founder - Making the Leap
EVENT (3/27): MGMT Hard Tech Breakfast, Co-Hosted by Fidelity Private Shares
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 (NEW) + Startups to Watch
Powered by RevenueBase
Trusted Partners - top local partners we’ve worked with directly at MGMT Boston or would trust with our own resources
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q1 Highlighted Startups: Cimulate, Connective Health, WHOOP, OnRamp
Q1 Highlighted Operators: Jeremy Aubin / TireTutor, Evan Klein / Benevity
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 1H Recap / 2024 2H Recap
NEW: Boston Startup Database
Which Boston based startup has raised the most venture capital since 2019? (Answer at the bottom of this e-mail)
RevenueBase has 150M+ global B2B contacts, 13M+ global companies, and 95% e-mail deliverability. Do you want contact level data to go along with this slick RevenueBase powered company database? Reach out to their team. Thanks Mark Feldman!
Matterbeam
Founder: Mike Kowalchik
Founding: 2022
Mission: End pipeline tyranny
Employees: 8 & 60% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & <$10M raised
Investors: AlleyCorp, Hyperplane, Impellent
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M (assuming average equity dilution in Pre-Seed fundraising)
^ 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!
Matterbeam is an infrastructure software startup ending data pipeline tyranny, freeing data to make enterprises more effective. This Seed stage startup envisions a deconstruction of ETL pipelines - extract, transform, load no more - so enterprise data is more portable, immutable, and most importantly...flexible.
Founder & CEO Michael Kowalchik has had a long and successful career in & around data. After Pluralsight acquired his last company, Smarterer (in 2014), he was tasked with integrating and migrating their various products into a platform offering (Smarterer was their 5th or 6th acquisition). Data wasn’t flowing freely across the enterprise so Mike & his team got to work redesigning how it flowed, creating a “data vascular system", with great success.
Eventually he left Pluralsight to take some time off and travel. But enterprise data remained trapped across the digital world. Whether it was his wife, a Marketing executive who couldn’t retrieve user analytics from a company database, or other friends at startups who had trouble ingesting data, they all struggled with getting access to and using data. When Mike heard about an industry white paper which theorized an approach similar to what he’d already built at Pluralsight, he took it as a sign from the universe to bring his Data Mesh vision to life.
Global cloud infrastructure spend is $700B+ in 2025 (src) and the global data pipeline market was $8B in 2023, growing to $33B+ by 2030 (src). Matterbeam is solving the complex answer to a simple question: “have you ever been at a company and tried to do anything with data that wasn’t in a BI dashboard? What was that experience like?” You know the answer.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at systems (see above), tools, and teams to address the symptoms of a flawed underlying system. There are major hidden costs in the form of productivity too. Getting access to data is just plain hard. But if you could make it easier, you could change the relationship with data across time, cost, and open up new possibilities for innovation.
Matterbeam is ending the tyranny of pipelines, re-thinking cloud infrastructure from the ground up. They store every piece of customer data in an immutable log - every record, every row, every event - that flows through. Too expensive, right? Well, not really anymore.
The lynchpin of their opportunity comes down to the falling cost of cloud storage. 1 petabyte of data - the equivalent of 200M 5MB photos, 233,000 DVD quality movies, or 500B pages of text - only costs $1,000/month when stored properly.
Matterbeam is able to store and emit data to multiple end layers (think Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, etc.) to make it more portable for teams across a company. Their Emitter gets enterprise data into the right tool in the right shape at the right time, functioning as the “load” component of a conventional ETL process.
Emitters operate independently from the data collection, so there’s flexibility to pause and restart without impacting the source tailored to a target system’s requirements. Their solution changes the mental model from point to point, single destination thinking and creates a system that’s much more like a network. Matterbeam is decoupling data from the destination (in both time and space), breaking apart traditional pipeline thinking. It’s a data agility platform!
After an initial deployment with one of their biggest initial customers, the COO came to Mike and asked if they could migrate the initial deployment from one database into their product experience. He gave them 3 weeks to get the resources properly allocated. But it only took 1 day! Matterbeam is allowing companies to change their strategies based on speed and data portability across CRM, search, and data migrations of all flavors without impacting production workloads.
Their target customers are VPs of Engineering and Data Science at mid-market companies with a roadmap to capture more of the enterprise in the coming years. They are working with a handful of initial customers via founder-led sales to refine their positioning and will deploy use cases at ever increasing scale to complete their platform offering.
The team’s big goals for 2025 are to finish building out their initial platform and sign long term contracts with their initial enterprise customers. They will likely complete a Seed fundraise and grow their engineering team to jumpstart the flywheel further. In the 2H of 2025, they hope to grow to dozens of mid market customers and bring on more engineers from their Boston HQ.
Operators to Know:
Ryan Betts, Senior Engineer
Iana Dankova, Product Manager
David Glickman, COO
Alex Jackson, GTM Leader
Kay Johansen, Senior Engineer
David Sturgis, Senior Engineer
Dane Thurber, Founding Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Matterbeam team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming in 2025!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key goals for 2025?
Who are Matterbeam’s largest incumbent competitors?
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 Matterbeam you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more data scientists into the future. All analysts, professional and amateurs alike, applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Barrett King, Head of Alliances at Ramp
Barrett King is a front of house partnerships leader who builds bridges, tops leaderboards, and fulfills visions through active listening for the world’s leading software enterprises. Today Barrett is the Head of Alliances at high flying fintech Ramp.
Here’s what you need to know about Barrett..
He grew up in a small cow town on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His dad worked in early dotcom software and his mom was a marital & family therapist who loved to give back. The perfect combination for a career in partnerships?
Barrett was a high school athlete and musician who went to study art & design at Full Sail University. At Full Sail, with their job-like deadline driven course work, he learned an intense work ethic and uncovered his most important gift, given by a friend: his words were his art. He was even elected to serve as class speaker at graduation!
Over the last few years he’s weathered the loss of both of his parents, causing him to reevaluate his life and make some important changes to be a better husband, father, and professional. He quit drinking, dropped 40 pounds, and runs a 5k 5 days per week alongside other fitness activities. Barrett, you’re making us look bad..
His career began in hospitality, serendipitously meeting the GM of Legal Test Kitchen in the Seaport, during a dinner with his aunt. This chance encounter led to a role as their Head of Hospitality. At LTK he expanded their private party & fine dining business by developing local partnerships with Fidelity and other Seaport based businesses to be their “go to” dining choice.
Next, Barrett became the first sales rep hire at Objective Logistics, a software company selling to restaurants. 60 days into his tenure he was promoted to replace the outgoing Sales Manager. He knew the vertical cold and hit his stride selling restaurant leaderboard & scheduling technology to increase restaurant ROI. He landed the MA Restaurant Association and a national deal with Another Broken Egg Cafe before the startup was acquired by Bit9.
After 9 interviews, Barrett landed at HubSpot as a Channel Account Manager under the guise that he was either “a master bullshit artist or an exceptional sales person”. After just 8 months in the role he was tapped by Dave McNeil to lead Partner Sales training, helping shorten rep ramp time and impacting productivity across the org.
Barrett re-entered the Partnerships team and became a 4x President Club award winner as well as the first Team Lead in the Partnerships org. He later went on to lead an Enterprise team, better understanding the “up market” motion and how top partners worked with the best sellers of the biggest deals at HubSpot.
Last, Barrett led Partner Ecosystem Strategy under Michele Eatherton & Brian Garvey, supporting their up market motion and partner strategy in general. HubSpot gave Barrett a SaaS MBA. He learned how to get shit done and feel empowered to drive impact. There was something special about HubSpot giving smart people the space to solve problems for 8+ magical years of his career.
After moving to New Breed, he notched the final step of partnerships: learning how ecosystem partners deliver on their end of channel partnerships. Then a year later, when Barrett was presented with an opportunity from a former HubSpot leader in Mark Stoddard to lead Alliances at Ramp, he just couldn't pass it up.
The opportunity at Ramp is massive. Barrett recently joined at a very similar stage to when he started at HubSpot. He is working across their core business lines - ERP, HRIS & ISV - to educate customers & front line sellers on the value of Ramp’s platform. Responsible for developing partnership motions, with a combination of strategy & GTM responsibility, he has a large mandate to drive meaningful impact. At Ramp, in love with the problem space, he’s ready to allow this next phase of work to speak for itself.
Partnerships Succeed with Active Listening & Value Alignment
When Barrett was asked to step out of a high performing sales role, he had to learn to design effective training for the broader org. Using everything he had learned about people in restaurants and enterprises, he distilled his lessons down to emphasize active listening.
Partnerships, from the front of the house to the back, are all about listening with the intent to understand.
At HubSpot, their most successful partnerships all had similar characteristics: value alignment with what HubSpot and the channel partner were mutually trying to achieve. In order to build something with meaning together, they had to find ways to pair their solutions together. On the HubSpot end, by leveraging their tools & technology to help marketing agencies sell more business, both the agency and HubSpot were able to drive increased revenue & value per customer through a focus on delivering ROI centric services.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Your Network is Your Net Worth - “90% of your success comes from who you surround yourself with. The way you win in your career is being around really important people (relative to what you care about)”
How are You Paid? - “You’re either the smarter person in the room and paid the most or, if you’re not, what you don't make up for in money you make up for in knowledge gain. Every once in a while you get both. Those are your lightning strike moments, hold onto those as long as you can!”
Goal Alignment - “What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of people do I want to do that work with? How do those 2 decisions impact the life I want to live? I try to be very intentional about living in accordance with the answers to those questions”
Barrett enjoys building things that have a meaningful impact on world class organizations. He’s determined to drive outsized returns to his partners that they themselves can use to grow exponentially. Long term, he wants to continue to ensure his experiences at places like HubSpot and Ramp are aligned to that professional northstar that feeds everything he wants to accomplish personally with family & friends too.
If you want to learn more about Barrett, you can find him spending time with his family, building Alliances at Ramp, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing all your hard fought lessons and experiences. We’re excited to see the world class partnership engine you build at Ramp in the quarters ahead!
EnFi & January Ventures on The Lantern
Joshua Summers, Co-Founder & CEO and Chris Aronis, newly appointed CRO come on The Lantern to talk about their plans to scale in 2025:
Jen Neundorfer joins to share what they’re building at January Ventures ahead of the release of their 6th Annual Founder Sentiment Report:
Answer: Devoted Health. Met Ed Park in a hallway once. He was all class. Has 3 followers on LinkedIn! Gangsta.
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
Met Mike at the Underscore event in the fall, awesome to see Matterbeam get some much deserved spotlight time!