MGMT Boston

Huge thanks to Matt Crane and MGMT Boston for the opportunity to share a bit about what's new with Topline Pro! We have an exciting year ahead of us, and if you or anyone you know are interested in learning more or joining us, I'd love to hear from you. Sharing career page link in comments.

Thanks to everyone who came out for our Buyers & Builders, Maximizing AI Potential event with C10 Labs. 🥶 On my drive into Cambridge I saw skaters out on the Charles River. February in Boston is...differentiated 🥶 Moderated by C10's Beth Porter and joined by Philip Ndikum, Karim Issa, Brendan McSheffrey, and ekai's Ozair A. we dug into how builders and buyers can bridge the gap to drive market adoption for this new platform shift. Like MIT's own Cursor team! Thank you to all who joined from the startup community, MGMT Boston, C10, and beyond. Special thanks to David Berlin for his masterful execution too. We'll hopefully see you again...when the thaw is complete!

Some recent headlines from around Boston's venture backed world the past couple weeks.. -We've got fundraisings -We've got new hires -We've got an acquisition -PartsTech (auto marketplace backed by OpenView) acquired by OEC -Lynx (fintech & healthtech) raises a $27M Series A led by Flare Capital Partners -7AI (AI / cybersecurity) comes out of stealth with their agentic security platform -EnFi, Inc (AI / fintech) announces Chris Aronis as their newly hired CRO to scale their commercial efforts in 2025 -Tive (SaaS) announces a $40M Series C led by Worldview Innovation Lab & Sageview Capital (also backed by NextView Ventures) -Chris Hogan was hired as Director of Commercial Sales at CloudZero to continue to build out their GTM team -VideaHealth (healthtech) raised a $40M Series B led by Threshold Ventures (also backed by Spark Capital & Pillar VC) -Patrol (AI - intersection of app & infra) announces their accessiblity & compliance product + a Seed round led by NextView Ventures, SBXi & others More happenings will be posted on MGMT Boston's News Feed. Check it out!

🏄♂️ 🏃♀️➡️ WHOOP is on a mission to unlock human performance, revolutionizing how people better understand their bodies 🏃♀️➡️🏄♂️ It's W4 / Q1 / 25 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got WHOOP, located just over the Green Monster in Kenmore, ushering in a new generation of AI driven tech for the human body. What should you know about WHOOP? -WHOOP is growing up -This is an AI, data & research company -Intl expansion is a key strategy in the coming years If you believe that health is wealth, you should believe in WHOOP. Here are 10 things to know about one of Boston’s best consumer startups: Origins in Athletic Training - Co-Founder Will Ahmed was a Harvard athlete who wanted to know how training was impacting his body. He teamed up with John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae in 2012 to bring this vision to life backed by Accomplice VC, Founder Collective, NextView Ventures & others New Product Coming Soon? - WHOOP released their first wearable, 1.0, in 2015. 2.0 followed in 2016, 3.0 in 2018, and 4.0 in 2021. We could be seeing 5.0 pretty soon.. Software Enabled Evolution - In 2018 the company transitioned from a $500 consumer hardware product to a sub based model to become a hardware enabled software company Secular Growth in Wearables - Over the last decade, WHOOP and the wearables market have grown rapidly. In 2024, wearables revs hit $125B and could more than double by 2030 Hub & Spoke Distro Model - The company sells a single flagship device (with 70k+ customizable color & material combinations) alongside an array of software & data products including WHOOP Coach (acts like a search engine for your body) & WHOOP Labs (conducts research onsite & digitally through members) WHOOP is AI Driven - Their team is partnering with OpenAI to drive adoption of LLMs internally, educate employees, and scale knowledge across the company (50+ internal GPTs developed, an AI Steering Committee & 25 Member AI Guild) 2024 Features Round Up - In Dec they announced their top features released in 2024. Highlights include tracking Body Composition and Weight changes, Heart Rate Zones, and more The Exec Team is Growing - Garrett Bastable recently joined as COO to kick off 2025. Ed Baker joined in 2023 as Chief Product Officer. Longtime Marketing leader John Sullivan was promoted to CMO in Feb '24 and Michener Chandlee joined as CFO in Oct ‘23 to bring more expertise to the C-Suite Intl Growth Focus - In Q4 2024 WHOOP announced a partnership with Flipkart to bring WHOOP to Indian consumers (now in 56 intl markets) Intl Ambassadorship(s) - Cristiano Ronaldo was announced as a new investor and partner in 2024 to help further elevate WHOOP’s brand and start a new chapter in the Middle East If you're interested in learning more, including up & coming operators at the company and the key roles WHOOP is hiring for, the full post is linked in the comments. And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

Welcome Erez Kaminski, Co-Founder & CEO at Ketryx on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥 Ketryx is a way to help people, computers, and AI agents work together to ship regulated products faster. They started in the medical devices space and now are expanding to hardware and other use cases outside of medicine, taking the most important products people build and help build them faster 🔍 What’s going on inside Ketryx heading into 2025? 🔎 In 2024 they went to market and proved that a lot of Fortune 500 companies are interested in their solution. They’re now having discussions with Fortune 50 customers and grew the team from 18 to 50 people. This team has proven that highly regulated medical device type products can now be shipped at the speed of regular software, helping some companies accelerate their product development lifecycle 100x. Ketryx has taken part in helping 10M patients get access to better healthcare through their covered customers & technology products with a roadmap to help 100M people. They’re expanding their offering to serve SMBs as well as large enterprises and will explore adjacent verticals like automotive, aerospace, etc. 🤔 What has Erez learned from his startup career & building Ketryx? 🤔 He's mostly learned how much he doesn’t know! Managing a high growth startup is a totally different beast than managing a few people on a team. He’s learned a lot about how people work. 2024 has highlighted how much the journey is about the people - finding the best talent and giving them space to perform. 🤝 How can we help? 🤝 Boston is a great location to be building Ketryx with 70% of Fortune 500 life sciences companies within walking distance to Kendall Square. They’d love to meet new partners! Reach out! Ketryx is also hiring mission driven people who want to serve patients and be part of this exciting journey The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston

🖌️🪜 Evan Klein is a storyteller, marketing leader, and high growth builder who prioritizes value and brings frameworks to the startup jungleland 🪜🖌️ It's W3 / Q1 / 2025 and this week in our MGMT Boston operator series we’ve got Evan, the VP of Product Marketing at Benevity, an engagement platform turning social impact into business impact. At Benevity, Evan is responsible for leading their Product Marketing function as the VP of Product Marketing for this mission driven company. They are helping their clients build more connected cultures, expand and communicate the social impact they are able to have, and dramatically increase employee engagement. Storytelling and Value Frameworks Evan has been toying with the idea of writing a book on product marketing leadership. In particular, making sure you view the company you work for and the products & services you offer in terms of “value first”. At 3 different startups now, Evan has come in and built value frameworks using a similar system. Credit to where credit is due: Phil Braden and Andrew Lau set him on this path first at Jellyfish. Now, it’s become one of the hallmarks of his career. Here’s how he does it.. 1.) He pulls in as many inputs as possible, focusing especially on conversations with customers, and boils down the company’s offerings into the jobs to be done 2.) These building blocks are translated into a simple framework (people can only consume so much info) that can be leveraged by the GTM org (and org wide) to better communicate the company’s value from an outside-in perspective. 3.) He creates consistency across functions by aligning messaging, web & content strategy, Sales and CS motions, and even product strategy around this framework, re-enforcing the value communicated to the market and creating a self-actualizing value loop Evan says it’s not rocket science, but you’d be surprised by how many companies don’t do this. Leading with value over features is a revenue driver, strategic driver, and positioning advantage regardless of the category! 3 Career Insights / Learnings 📈 Get Close to Revenue - “At Black Duck, Lou Shipley taught me to ‘place myself as close to revenue as possible’. That doesn’t mean becoming a sales leader, but instead aligning your role as close to revenue impact as possible...Product Marketing can serve as an advisory relationship to the GTM strategy and motion if done properly” ✊ Hard Times = Great Learnings - “You do your best learning during the times that feel the hardest. Leaving a company when things get hard might feel good in the short term but dealing with adversity can make you better for weathering it.” 🏄♂️ Unplanned Moves - "Sometimes the best career moves are the ones you don’t plan. I never thought of myself as a marketer coming out of business school but it turned out to be the best possible fit. Be open to possibilities.” Go ahead and sign up for the newsletter to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead!

🩺 🥼Connective Health is building a healthtech service for doctors so they are better equipped with the right data at the right time to deliver high quality care to patients 🥼 🩺 It's W2 / Q1 / 25 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Connective Health, a Seed stage startup leveraging interoperability for automated medical record retrieval and customized summaries to deliver a better experience for providers and better outcomes for patients. Founded by Joe Athman, Chris DiBlasi, and Ryan Hess, MBA this trio previously worked together at Surescripts. Ryan and the team have known for decades, seeing it up close at Surescripts, that our healthcare system still works in antiquated ways. The concept of interoperability, which was supposed to solve many of healthcare’s ills, has been a grind to become a useful force. Healthcare is still fragmented. When your parents come down to visit from New Hampshire, they’re probably bringing a 4 inch thick binder with their entire patient history because the doctor they're going to see won’t have it. On the other hand, if they do bring it, no one’s going to look at it.. And it certainly won’t improve their care. The healthcare provider network management market just passed $4B and is projected to grow to $12B by 2032. Healthcare is 17% of U.S. GDP and provider burnout to service this behemoth of a system is a real thing. Some studies show physician burnout prevalence as high as 60%. Connective Health uses AI & analytics to deliver a doctor exactly what they need ahead of each patient appointment, combing through patient files as long as 500 pages from 10 different locations and reformatting those sources to deliver specific and actionable information. Making sense of these disparate data networks, formats, and information is where the magic happens so doctors can more quickly figure out why the patient is there and deliver great care. Connective Health locates 98% of patients, analyzes 1M documents per month, combs pharmacy databases, and interacts with 4,000+ clinical sites monthly. This Seed stage startup billed $1M+ ARR in 2024 with bookings 2-3x of that number. Their customers pay per provider with average deal sizes ranging from $50k - $500k with a small but mighty team of 8. Their goal is to triple their revenue growth in 2025, growing to dozens of customers, as they look to grow their GTM team further. Operators to Know: -Anne Jacobson, Director, Customer and Product Success -Kathryn Jaggers, Product Strategist -Richard Kramer, VP of Sales -Adam L., Director of Engineering -David Theobald, VP of Business Development If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

🛒 Cimulate, Inc. is building a generative AI platform for commerce, peering into the future and redefining the customer experience for a gen-AI and LLM-driven era 🛒 It's W1 / Q1 / 25 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Cimulate, a startup leveraging AI to reimagine the commerce customer experience starting with search and enable brands to help people find products they love. John Andrews & Vivek Farias were introduced in 2014 by Steve Papa, the Founder of Endeca. John was an Endeca veteran of 8+ years who stayed on to run Oracle’s Commerce product and Vivek is an MIT professor who has been leading AI initiatives for over a decade. John & Vivek teamed initially at Celect, a successful retail analytics startup, which was acquired by Nike in 2019. TLDR? These are commerce veterans. When GPT 3.5 was released, it became clear there was a real opportunity to leverage AI in new ways for commerce. U.S. e-commerce sales are due to exceed $1T in 2024 for the 3rd consecutive year. Generative AI will disrupt legacy players with platforms built on keyword & vector search optimization. The shopping experience is about to undergo a massive transformation. To start? It will become more conversational. If you were planning to go to the Taylor Swift concert you would traditionally start browsing online to pull together an outfit. Or perhaps call your friends. But wouldn’t it be much better (and pretty fun) to shop by asking your favorite retailer(s) for some ideas? Cimulate is building the CustomerGPT to present users with an optimized set of content from their favorite retailer by more deeply understanding customer intent. This LLM-based customer behavior engine allows them to deliver the optimal assortment of products and interactions to drive more sales. Cimulate believes that owning the search infrastructure paired with the LLM driven conversational piece is really important to delivering a high performance shopping experience. The Cimulate team is seeing upwards of 25% increase in engagement and 15% increase in purchase rates when compared to solutions that were considered state of the art just a couple of years ago. From John and Vivek’s whiteboard sessions in the summer of 2023, to a Seed fundraise and recently announced Series A fundraise led by Spark Capital in Q4 2024, it’s game on for 2025! The key initiative for 2025 is to scale GTM - building a pre-sales, post-sales & marketing team - acquiring dozens of customers as they build out their platform from Boston HQ. Operators to Know: -Alinna Brown, Product Manager -Juan Manuel Chaneton, Head of Data Science -Yizhou Huang, Research Scientist -Mohamed Abdul Huq Ismail, Staff Software Engineer -John Roman, Staff Software Engineer -Evan Yao, Research Scientist -John Lazenby, Senior Data Scientist If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

💻🤝 Cephable is a personal, private, and accessible AI platform that enables users to control their digital devices through adaptive voice commands, head movements, virtual buttons, and AI task automation 🤝 💻 It's W12 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Cephable, a Seed stage startup building a platform designed to enhance accessibility and inclusivity. Cephable was founded in 2023 by Alexander Dunn, an applied ML engineer who was formerly the CPO at Voicify. A tinkerer by trade, he saw that his younger brother, who has a disability, was unable to keep up with friends while gaming, and falling behind with the technology at school. Globally there are more than 1.3B people (15-20% of the global population) with disabilities who have an annual discretionary spending power of $13T according to the World Economic Forum. This includes cognitive, mobility, hearing, vision & other restrictions that prevent millions of people from enjoying games & digital experiences. 💵 Can you imagine not being able to access an ATM to take out some cash?  🐢 Or fire a tortoise shell at Wario on the Rainbow Road racetrack?  ✉️ Or how about just logging onto the computer to send an email? Cephable is enabling a new digital customer via their software platform which launched publicly in August 2023 to solve the “disability tax,” an additional cost that many people with disabilities have to pay for adaptive tech. Today they’ve built innovative, responsive algorithms that are adaptive to visual & audio commands across languages and commands. Cephable recently announced partnerships with Microsoft & Qualcomm to build “out of the box” PC experiences which will include Cephable controls integrated into OEM (original equipment manufacturing) devices like Lenovo, HP & Dell computers & tablets. These large scale enterprise partnerships will take the startup from 10s of thousands of users to 10s of millions in the coming quarters. This fast-growing Boston-based startup grew their end user base from early adoption to its 2024 year-end user base by more than 10,000x. They’re expecting to grow another 10,000x in 2025, turbocharged by their newly established enterprise relationships. They are closing in on seven figures of annual revenue in the 1H of 2025, with their average Enterprise pipeline deal size now approaching seven figures too! Next year they will plan to bring on more engineers, marketing resources, and grow their customer success & sales operations teams. Cephable is backed locally by Hyperplane, Founder Collective, and other notable VCs. Operators to Know: -Jason Fields, COO -Jonathan Campbell, Director of Engineering -Cordellia Yokum, Senior Software Development Engineer -Shristi Chitlangia, Software Engineer -Julia Franklin, Chief Learning Officer -Alexa Orban, Director of Marketing Communications If you're interested in learning more, including the key roles Cephable is hiring for, the full post is linked below

One of the things that makes Boston's tech ecosystem so powerful is the connective tissue. 💪 And few are doing as much to connect exciting ventures, founders, investors, institutions and operators as Matt Crane. 🏆 That's why it was fun - and quintessentially Boston - to first connect with Matt at the Underscore VC Summit, following a conversation with Mirakl's Amelia Van Camp, then sit down a couple of months later for a wide-ranging chat. We covered a lot of ground including: 👉 Distilling the wins - and the scars - of many years as an operator, including de-risking high impact hires at various stages of growth. Focusing on ability to deliver relevant impact today will save you many sleepless nights. 👉 Navigating the "middle school dance" of founder/operating advisor matches. There's hardly a job title to be found in LinkedIn headlines anymore. In the era of pervasive "CXO/Investor/Advisor" branding, how do you connect with people who are capable of delivering the right kind of impact? 👉 How Flashpoint is closing out the year. Our December isn't your December. Yes, we're also closing Q4 while budgeting and planning for '25. But it's against a backdrop of working to protect clients from a host of daunting cyber, physical and geopolitical threats. Welcome to the world of threat intelligence. Thanks again, Matt, and look forward to more collaboration in the New Year!