Drumroll, please. BostInno is thrilled to present our 2020 Inno on Fire honorees.
Today, we’re officially announcing the 50 people and companies (53, counting the Alumni Blazers that we’ll also honor this year) that are heating up Boston’s ecosystem. Previously known as 50 on Fire, Inno on Fire celebrates Boston’s most inspiring and fastest-growing startups and individuals. We’re here to honor everyone who has played a part in advancing Boston’s ever-growing innovation ecosystem in times that are nothing short of extraordinary.
As we’ve done for the last two years, we’re announcing all 50 winners prior to our (virtual!) Fire party to give you adequate time to celebrate. Still, it wouldn’t be Fire without a big reveal. In December, we’ll announce the 2020 Inno Blazers at our online event—stay tuned for details. One Blazer will be chosen from each category by an elite panel of judges, and each Blazer will receive the time-honored red blazer jacket.
This year marks BostInno's ninth annual Inno on Fire. That means that, since 2010, we’ve showcased nearly 500 of Boston’s best and brightest.
Traditionally, the businesses we honor have raised funding, released a game-changing product, filed patents, emerged from stealth, landed a massive partner or client, built a mentor network, initiated charitable give-back programs, made a significant hire, expanded internationally or executed a successful pivot. We also spotlight individuals who are leading, supporting or assisting these organizations.
In the age of Covid-19, the 2020 list may look different than in years past. Yet, while the coronavirus has severely affected countless businesses, organizations and industries, it has also galvanized our collective entrepreneurial spirit—not just in Boston, but across the entire American Inno network.
Candidates were selected from both internal and external nominations, and winners were selected by the BostInno editorial team.
Read about all 50 Inno on Fire honorees, plus a couple of alumni, below.
Food and Agtech
The winners making big moves in the food, nutrition and agriculture spaces.
Nutrimedy: Brookline-based Nutrimedy is a telehealth app and online platform that connects patients with registered dieticians. These dieticians can offer guidance on over 50 conditions, regardless of physical location. In June, Nutrimedy, in partnership with TechSprings at Baystate Health, received a $95,000 Sandbox Grant from the Massachusetts eHealth Institute. Just a month later, the company announced it would be participating in its first clinical trial with Brigham and Women’s Hospital to study the impact of a 12-week weight loss program for patients to be able to qualify for total joint arthroplasty of the hip or knee. To top it all off, Nutrimedy won LaunchBio’s Big Pitch 2020 National Championship in August.
Squadle: Squadle, founded by Le Zhang in 2013, is a technology company that offers user-friendly applications that streamline food safety and reduce costs for multi-unit operators like McDonald’s and Dunkin’. As a response to the coronavirus pandemic, the company released a new solution for restaurants and food retailers to screen employee and guest health, the Squadle Sense Thermal Scanner. This wall-mounted scanner uses thermal cameras to conduct temperature screenings without having to touch the actual device. In September, Squadle completed a Series A round of an undisclosed amount. At the same time, the company named Charlie Piper, a veteran retail industry executive, as chairman of its board of directors.
Tertill (formerly Franklin Robotics): Tertill, created by Roomba inventor Joe Jones and veteran roboticist Rory MacKean in 2015, is a weeding robot that runs on solar power. The robot’s wheels churn topsoil, which prevents weeds from sprouting. This year, the robot’s efficiency as a home garden weed solution was validated by two independent studies — one at the University of Maine and the other at the Cornell School of Agriculture. Tertill also named Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot, as CEO and chairman this year.
Evergreens: Evergreens is working to reduce costs, waste and lengthy supply chains within the agricultural market. With its patent-pending automated vertical farming technology, the company grows food indoors allowing the agricultural production to be profitable at a large scale. Evergreens has access to three vertical farms in Burlington through a partnership with Northeastern University. Founded by Ahmad Zameli, the company won the Ahold Delhaize Supply Chain Innovation Pitch Award earlier this month; the company is also a MassChallenge Boston 2020 Finalist. The startup has raised $750,000 in pre-seed funding.
Security Tech
Cybersecurity firms and physical security companies on the cutting edge.
Evolv Technology: Using AI-based threat detection software, Evolv Technology limits person-to-person interaction during security screenings at entertainment venues, schools and airports. Earlier this year, the company raised $30 million in a Series C funding round led by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s firm, Finback Investment Partners. In August, the company formed a strategic partnership with Stanley Ventures and completed another round of funding of an undisclosed amount. This summer, Six Flags Entertainment Corporation began using Evolv’s touchless threat detection system as a part of its amusement park reopening plans. The startup, which has been backed by Bill Gates since 2013, was also the recipient of several awards this year, including a 2020 Campus Safety award and an Edison Awards Gold Medal.
Privitar: Founded in London in 2014, Privitar is a British data privacy software company based in Boston. The company raised a total of $87 million in a two-tranche Series C funding round led by Warburg Pincus, completing the $80 million first tranche in April before receiving an additional $7 million from HSBC in June. In the last 12 months, Privitar has increased its headcount from 90 employees to 195 and added new offices in Austin, Singapore and Warsaw. Privitar also expanded its executive leadership team, naming Steven Totman, former managing director of financial services at Cloudera, as chief product officer.
Guardicore: Guardicore, a data center and cloud security company that protects customers’ core assets, saw 5X revenue growth and 34 percent employee base growth this year and expanded its global footprint into Mumbai, India. It was a Gold Award Winner at the 2020 Info Security PG's Global Excellence Awards. Along with winning the Gold for Most Innovative Security Software of the Year, the company also won the Bronze award for the Most Innovative Cloud Security. In February, Guardicore released version 5 of its Centra Security Platform, which provides solutions for customers’ cloud applications.
CyberSaint Security: CyberSaint Security started the year off strong by winning five gold medals at the 5th annual Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. With its cybersecurity risk and compliance management platform, the company also celebrated a 300 percent growth in revenue between its second and third quarters of 2020. Earlier this month, CyberSaint was named as the only Integrated Risk Management solution in Google’s Cloud Partner Program. In partnership with Google Cloud, the company will offer customers the ability to leverage data across various applications and manage risk across cloud workloads.
Devo Technology: Cloud-native logging and analytics company Devo Technology closed a $60 million Series D funding round just last month and, at the same time, got a new CEO in former LogMeIn COO Marc van Zadelhoff. Devo experienced 80 percent year-over-year growth in the first half of 2020 and increased its headcount in the U.S. by more than 50%. It also won a $9.5 million contract from the U.S. Air Force. The company has set a goal of growing the team by an additional 25 percent by the end of 2020.
Software
Cloud computing, data analytics, AI and more.
LeanIX: Founded in 2012 by Jörg Beyer and André Christ, LeanIX provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application to drive enterprise architecture and cloud governance for brands. In July, the company pulled in $80 million led by Goldman Sachs in a Series D funding round. Since the beginning of the year, LeanIX has nearly doubled its headcount, growing from 40 employees to 70. The company was certified as a “great place to work” by the Great Place to Work Institute in July.
Validity: Validity, a customer data quality startup in Boston, kicked off the year by acquiring email analytics provider 250ok in February for an undisclosed amount. In April, the startup launched the Validity for Good Program to provide government agencies with temporary free access to the Return Path Email Certification service, ensuring critical emails arrive in inboxes, not spam folders. In August, Validity launched Everest, an email marketing platform that gives customers control over all stages of email marketing. Aside from these new programs, Validity also appointed Gary Hall as CFO.
ChaosSearch: ChaosSearch’s cloud-built data lake engine offers customers fast and easy access to data that the company says is up to 80 percent less expensive than other solutions. In April, ChaosSearch announced its next-generation platform, ChaosSearch 2.0, which turns a company’s own data lake into a streamlined analytics engine. ChaosSearch has grown its revenue by a factor of 10 since the start of the coronavirus pandemic and hired Ed Walsh, a former GM in IBM’s storage division, as the company’s new CEO.
Luminoso: With 83 percent growth over the past three years, Luminoso earned a spot on this year’s Inc. 5000. The company, which turns text data into business-critical insights, was ranked 4,136. Over the last 12 months, Luminoso has launched two new text analytic applications, Express for Luminoso Daylight and Search Enhancement, and a new learning model, Concept-Level Sentiment. Earlier this month, the company promoted Henning Smith to CTO.
GRAX: GRAX provides customers with a SaaS data-value platform, which allows them to back up, archive, recover and access historical cloud data. Last October, GRAX closed a $12 million Series A round led by Volition Capital and has put that money to use even during the pandemic, growing revenue by 120 percent year-over-year. GRAX has also doubled its headcount and hired its first CTO, former Salesforce CTO Morten Bagai.
Cleantech and Greentech
The startups focused on renewable energy and climatetech in the clean energy hub of Boston.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems: This company is on the verge of creating the world’s first net energy fusion system by using superconducting magnetic technology. Backed by MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Commonwealth Fusion Systems is working to design and build a device that confines the fusion process by using a magnetic field known as tokamak. Its energy fusion system SPARC and scientific approach was recognized by the Journal of Plasma Physics, which predicts that the company is on a fast path to achieve net energy from fusion. The company’s team hopes the final product will make a difference for climate change and will use the $84 million investment it raised in May to accelerate its timeline.
REsurety: Providing data in the area of renewable energy is what this company does best. REsurety enables buyers and sellers to understand the clean energy space to better assess what’s being bought and sold. With a team of meteorologists and finance professionals, REsurety helps users understand when the wind blows and how much the sun shines. Last year the company launched a software product that maps weather patterns and their impacts on renewables across the globe called REmap. It ended 2019 with more than 5,000 megawatts of energy risk mitigation projects in its portfolio.
Radical Plastics: The young Beverly startup is on a mission to replace plastic packaging with a biodegradable, recyclable material. Founders and polymer engineers Kristin Taylor and Yelena Kann met while working at Yield10 Bioscience (formerly Metabolix), which they left in 2013 to begin developing their product. The first iteration of the product, which Taylor and Kann have received a patent for, is designed to be used as an agricultural film plowed into the soil at the end of harvest season. Next, Radical Plastics plans to enter plastic bags and food wrappings.
Impact Investors
The venture capitalists and funds making a difference.
Habib Haddad: In August, when an explosion devastated the city of Beirut, E14 Fund managing partner Habib Haddad stepped up to help. Haddad co-founded Beirut Box, a local restaurant initiative to raise funds for relief efforts for the 5,000 injured and 300,000 newly stranded Lebanese citizens. Each chef participating in the initiative created their own “Beirut Box” with Lebanese-inspired food, with proceeds going toward the nonprofit Social and Economic Action for Lebanon.
One Way Ventures: The Boston-based venture capital firm was founded in 2017 to back startups with at least one immigrant founder. Three years on, the firm has made more than 40 investments, including in Boston-based data company Sentenai and 3D card manufacturer Lovepop. One Way Ventures, which only has four full-time employees and is still investing out of its first, $28 million fund, is now looking to expand to the West Coast with an office in San Francisco.
Ecosystem Supporters
Rising tides lift all boats. These organizations are making Boston a better place to be for startups.
EllisX: Stepping out of beta mode in June, EllisX is a year-old venture that matches early-stage companies with independent media and event organizers. EllisX’s “authentic marketing” approach allows companies to share their stories via podcasts, articles and events. The company serves over 80 businesses and is currently completely bootstrapped. In July, The Massachusetts Innovation Network named EllisX as a finalist for its annual New England Innovation Awards. Richard Okyere Mensah, founder of EllisX, was one of BostInno’s 25 Under 25 list in 2019.
Cleantech Open Northeast: The cleantech accelerator program, one of the largest in the northeastern U.S., finds, funds and fosters entrepreneurs focused on solving environmental challenges. Over the past 15 years, 283 out of 414 startups Cleantech Open Northeast has supported are still active, giving the accelerator program a 68 percent success rate. Of the 47 startups in the 2020 cohort, there are 13 teams led by women, eight led by women of color and nine teams led by a person of color. This year, the company formed a partnership with Urban Future Lab to address climate change specifically in New York.
MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future: For the past two years, the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future has impacted national dialogue through its research on technology, work and society. In 2020 alone, the Task Force has published several research briefs on topics like warehousing and trucking during Covid-19, the future of autonomous vehicles and why the urban job escalator has stopped moving—especially for people of color. Executive director of the Task Force, Elisabeth Reynolds, was also involved with Massachusetts Emergency Response Team (M-ERT). M-ERT, aided by MIT faculty, students, and alumni, helped local manufacturers produce more than 9 million pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE).
Innovation Women: This summer, Lexington-based Innovation Women acquired two companies: Lioness for the Female Entrepreneur and My Speaker Leads. Lioness for the Female Entrepreneur published global news on female entrepreneurship, while My Speaker Leads was an online resource for speakers, sending them 100 speaking opportunity leads every week. Innovation Women, founded in 2015 by Bobbie Carlton, creates visibility opportunities by connecting professional women speakers with event managers. This past year, the company has continued to place women on panels, organized interviews and arranged speaking engagements (virtual and in-person) at events like the General Assembly Women in Tech Panel, SIM Boston Technology Leadership Summit and the FRED Forum.
Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBio): During the Covid-19 pandemic, MassBio, the nonprofit organization for Massachusetts’ life sciences industry, teamed up with three institutions to create the Life Sciences Emergency SupplyHub. MassBio, along with the Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Council, Massachusetts Health and Hospital Association and the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals, put out a call to action to the life science community to donate PPE to the state’s health care institutions. The Emergency SupplyHub received donations from over 500 companies. About 500,000 N95 masks and other PPE were distributed to more than 100 local health care organizations.
Biotech
The companies cementing Boston's status as America's life sciences hub.
Olaris: This biopharma startup ended 2019 with $4.2 million in Series A financing and is on the verge of commercialization. Led by CEO and founder Dr. Elizabeth O’Day, Olaris has created a “Biomarkers of Response” platform to determine whether a patient will respond to certain drugs or treatments for certain types of diseases. The patent-pending technology was recognized by STAT for developing more biomarker-based tests over the past year for metastatic gastrointestinal stromal tumors, Parkinson’s and for immunosuppressive drugs given before a kidney transplant. O’Day is also making moves as head of an Access and Fair Pricing task force for the World Economic Forum’s Global Precision Medical Initiative. Our sister publication the Boston Business Journal named O’Day one of its 40 Under 40 honorees.
Thrive Earlier Detection: As its name suggests, Thrive Earlier Detection strives to detect forms of cancer in a patient early on. Its CancerSEEK blood test analyzes a highly targeted set of DNA and protein measurements in a patient’s blood to identify cancers. The company published results from its study less than a year after it was formed, which identified 65 percent of cancers in asymptomatic patients. The company was able to collect $257 million in Series B financing months after the study and has named the former vice president of Transformational Health Product organization for CVS Health as its chief medical officer. It is now seeking approval for a registration trial to collect more data and hopes to have FDA approval once that study is completed.
Talaris Therapeutics: On a mission to get organ transplant recipients off of lifelong immunosuppressants, Talaris has created a cell therapy and is on track to test its solution on those suffering from severe forms of autoimmune disease. Results from the company's prior Phase 2 study earned $115 million in Series B financing from top-tier investors. Its lead candidate, FCR001, has shown promising results in keeping some transplant recipients off anti-rejection medications. The company is looking to begin a third clinical trial in 2021. It was recently awarded the Citeline “Clinical Trial Result of the Year” award by Informa Pharma Intelligence and and is now enrolling kidney transplant recipients in a Phase 3 trial.
Akouos: Addressing disabling hearing loss across the globe is what drives Akouos to work on gene therapies, which could restore, improve and preserve one's hearing. The precision genetic medicine company uses new insights in biology to develop AAV-based gene therapies. Data on its approach and therapy platform was presented to the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy this year following a $105 million Series B financing round in March. Akouos made its stock market debut in June with a $213 million IPO. It is working on multiple gene therapies in several areas, including otoferlin-mediated hearing loss, Usher syndrome and autosomal dominant hearing disorders.
Lyndra Therapeutics: 2020 has been quite a year for the Lyndra Therapeutics team. The team has developed a way to deliver a high dose of medications to those suffering from chronic illnesses orally. The once-a-day therapy slowly releases a steady dose of medications in the stomach that can last up to a week or longer. On the heels of completing multiple clinical studies, Lyndra is on track to have more than 15 trials of its once-a-day capsule initiated over the next 18 months. The company opened a GMP manufacturing site in Lexington in April to create materials for a Phase II study. It also brought on former Moderna Therapeutics’ leader of delivery science, Orn Almarsson, as its new CTO in June.
Health Tech and Medtech
These companies are supporting health care providers as well as healthy communities.
meQuilibrium: At the height of the pandemic, meQuilibrium launched a website to address workforce wellbeing for those cooped up at home due to stay-at-home orders. The Boston-based computer science company saw millions turning to its technology in order to measure the impact the crisis had on workforce behavioral health and how to address the needs of certain employees. Now, the company is closing more deals and expanding its offerings to current customers. It credits its covid-19-specific strategy for peaked interest in its science and data analytics technology and its focus on issues such as anxiety, depression and burnout.
Hydrow: This Cambridge-based company’s technology promises to create the feeling of rowing directly on water from the comfort of your own home. We named Hydrow one of our Startups to Watch in 2020, and the startup has borne out our expectations. With more people working out at home amid a pandemic, Hydrow saw an immediate boost in equipment sales: Sales of its machines in April were four times those of January, CEO Bruce Smith told the Boston Globe. To date, more than 1 million workouts have been completed in 2020 on Hydrow. The startup has several big names attached to it, too. Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers invested in its $25 million Series A-2 round in June, and comedian Kevin Hart was named creative director just this month.
Activate Care: Improving health outcomes is at the core of this tech company’s mission. Founded to connect health providers and community partners with patients in need, cloud-based health tech startup Activate Care has expanded its offerings and improved its platform to reach more patients, including launching a Spanish-language version last year. In response to the Covid-19 pandemic Activate Care created a special section on its CareHub platform to help hospitals keep track of patients and report data, improving outcomes in Oregon and parts of California. Activate Care has also helped Boston Medical Center staff reduce avoidable inpatient visits.
PatientPing: PatientPing already had tens of thousands of healthcare providers in its portfolio, but 2020 brought over 1,000 more. The company developed a care collaboration and e-notification platform that is now equipped to alert different hospital and health care providers on the same patient’s Covid-19 diagnosis. In addition to announcing two new solutions on its care collaboration product suite, PatientPing secured $60 million in Series C financing to expand across the U.S., particularly the West Coast. During the pandemic, PatientPing's software has supported primary care clinics by alerting them of patient discharges from hospitals so providers could follow up with patients to schedule telehealth visits. The company also introduced a Covid-19 Flag feature, which enables providers to identify and monitor presumptive Covid patients’ data in real time.
IntelyCare: Starting the year off with $45 million in Series B financing, the Quincy-based nurse staffing startup was thrown into a year like no other. IntelyCare invested in data science and machine learning algorithms that underpin its technology, which led to double-digit growth in the first few months of the pandemic. The company’s mobile app and hub technology has trained over 550,000 nursing professionals since and doubled its revenue over the past year alone. The app has successfully recruited over 15,000 health care workers, meeting the need of those looking to staff more nurses. It’s the top Massachusetts company on this year’s Inc. 5000 and was recognized as one of the state's fastest-growing private companies by the Boston Business Journal earlier this year. Plus, it recently redesigned its office.
Kebotix: Kebotix, a startup that seeks to transform the way new chemicals and materials are discovered through AI, raised $11.4 million in Series A financing this spring and quickly expanded its lab operations in Woburn. The technology platform company’s self-driving lab is completely powered by AI and robotics with a proven record for condensing a decades-long research cycle into a matter of months. Kebotix houses the world’s biggest AI brain for chemistry and materials and has collaborated with the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Advancing Translational Services and Northeastern University on brain cancer therapy.
Cardiologs: Since first setting foot in Boston in 2019, Cardiologs has been ramping up sales of its cloud-based software for cardiac diagnostics in North America. Its AI-powered system uses diagnostic clinical science to collect data from a range of cardiac monitoring devices, delivering a more reliable and efficient diagnosis for patients. Known for electrocardiograms, or EKG data analysis, the company recently expanded its offerings to include remote patient monitoring. The company successfully raised $15 million in a Series A round in January. Its co-founder Yann Fleureau was featured in last year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list in Europe and spoke at the HIMSS Global Health conference in Florida earlier this year.
Early-Stage
The next big thing. These firms all have fewer than 10 employees or are pre-Series A, yet they're advancing rapidly.
WellNested: Originally founded at MIT as CaroCare, new parent-focused startup WellNested adapted to the times and met new mothers where they were at amid the pandemic. WellNested’s platform allows customers to schedule post-natal care and lactation support appointments virtually, in-person and provides a hybrid option for new parents. Its services became even more important once hospital stays for new parents were limited to 48 hours or less in most instances due to the Covid-19 outbreak. Experts in WellNested’s network can use the platform to provide research, set appointments and provide options for new parents and their newborns. The startup partnered with BostInno on a video series called “How I Did This” featuring parents who are also entrepreneurs.
Plannuh: Marketers looking to free up time spent on planning, budgeting and ROI tracking have turned to this company to automate these tedious tasks. With its platform, Plannuh provides marketing budget and expense management data with the use of AI. After kicking off the year with a $4 million seed round from Glasswing Ventures and Google’s AI venture fund, Gradient, the startup experienced exponential growth and doubled its staff. Plannuh founder and CEO Peter Mahoney co-wrote “The Next CMO: A Guide to Operational Marketing Excellence,” a book released in August, to help marketing leaders develop a strategy for operational excellence and launched a podcast by the same name, which caught the eyes of the CMOs of Pepsi and AARP.
Lit: Educators and students alike are turning to language-learning applications to expand their knowledge of other languages. Lit is looking to change the game with its input-based technology to exposure to different languages beyond simple vocabulary. Three months after building an application for language acquisition, Lit launched a beta version of its software that promises exposure to high-frequency vocabulary and compelling exercises after each session. The beta version has over 20 novice and intermediate digital stories, more than 1,000 post-work activities and other customizable functions.
Motional: This startup, with ties to MIT, is behind the world’s highest-performing autonomous vehicles. Started as a partnership between Hyundai and Aptiv and rebranded as Motional in August, the company is in constant communication with local and state leaders to provide workshops to transportation advisory groups and first responders on its technology. Motional’s dataset, nuScenes, has been used by thousands of researchers in the driverless tech space and has been cited in over 250 scientific papers. The company’s 2-19 white paper, “Safety First of Automated Driving,” is regarded as the standard in safety guidelines for autonomous vehicles.
VODA.ai: Water utility companies are turning to VODA.ai for help in predicting whether a water pipe is likely to fail within a year. The company uses machine learning to help its clients prioritize pipeline repair and management. VODA.ai estimates its cloud-based technology is twice as reliable than traditional methods. So far, the startup has signed on more than 20 utility companies as beta partners and raised over $2 million in investment funding. Its award-winning method has also caught the eye of several large customers who have signed onto annual agreements with the company.
Other – Inno Picks
Robotics, e-commerce, travel—these blazing startups are the best of the rest.
Berkshire Grey: The seven-year-old robotics startup isn’t just your Tech Madness champion this year — it’s also on fire. Berkshire Grey kicked off the year by closing a $263 million Series B round led by none other than SoftBank. That funding was used to make several key new hires, including Neil Berry, whose appointment in July was used to announce Berkshire Grey’s expansion into Europe. The pandemic has provided a growth opportunity as Berkshire Grey’s warehouse robots help get products to consumers safely and efficiently.
Thrasio: This year, Walpole-based e-commerce startup Thrasio became the fastest company to ever reach profitable unicorn status: in less than two years’ time. The company brought in $20 million in December last year, then snagged another $110 million in March, then a whopping $260 million in July at a new $1 billion valuation. Thrasio is now the largest buyer of Amazon businesses and is among the top 25 sellers on Amazon with 75 businesses in its portfolio.
Humatics: The New England Venture Capital Association singled out Humatics as a rising star last year. It seems that assessment was accurate. Over the last year, Humatics, a microlocation startup that can pinpoint your location within a millimeter, completed the MTA's 2019 Ultra-wideband Pilot, deploying 5.5 miles of track in Brooklyn, N.Y., and completed functional train control testing on and collected positioning data from four R143 subway train sets. It received honors from such industry groups as Gartner, Robotics Business Review and IDC. And just last month, the startup raised $30 million in Series B funding.
Portico Travel: It’s not easy for a travel company to be ablaze in a pandemic, but Portico Travel has grown over 70 percent since March, helping satisfy pent-up travel demand and providing resources for first-time road-trippers. The nearly four-year-old startup counts edX COO Adam Medros and Covey founder and former Marie Claire editor-in-chief Lesley Seymour among its advisors.
Tulip Interfaces: Somerville-based Tulip, a developer of a no-code manufacturing app platform, is the brainchild of Formlabs co-founder Natan Linder and MIT Media Lab researcher Rony Kubat. Since securing $39.5 million in Series B funding last year, Tulip has expanded in EMEA and Japan and built on a partnership with DMG MORI, the world’s leading manufacturer of machine tools. Tulip has also stepped up to solve supply chain problems caused by Covid-19, launching a personal protection equipment (PPE) logistics platform that has since been used to ship tens of thousands of face shields, masks and gloves to hospitals around the U.S.
Vecna Robotics: Vecna Robotics, the Waltham-based company behind self-driving forklifts and AI-powered workflow software, kicked off the year with a $50 million Series B round, which it planned to use to double its workforce over the next couple years. That was shortly after it unified its manufacturing facility, testing space and offices into a single, 77,000-square-feet space. Vecna now has partnerships and contracts with UniCarriers Americas, DHL Supply Chain, FedEx Ground and a subsidiary of Mitsubishi, among others.
Alyce: Alyce, the Boston-based startup that’s rethinking corporate swag, was on track to grow 1,200 percent by the end of 2019. This year, the pace has barely let up. Alyce pivoted this spring to accelerate digital gifting solutions for its enterprise customers through a new market category called “Personal Experience.” The startup has nearly doubled its headcount in 2020 and is now closing in on $10 million annual recurring revenue, growth over more than 500 percent.
Fortify: When many were sent home to work, this 3D-printing company was determined to help those on the frontlines. After engaging with the medical community in Boston, Fortify used its 3D-printing capabilities to produce PPE and other medical equipment needed at the height of the pandemic. From its Boston office in Hood Park, the company printed tools for Covid-19 response projects and went public with its FLUX ONE 3D printer. With its first product up and running at customer sites and a newly hired vice president in engineering, this company hopes to see more success in the years ahead.
Alumni
These past Fire winners have rekindled their flames in 2020, stoking big things for the future.
Notarize: The Boston-based online notarization startup has found new opportunities driven by Covid-19. One of our 2018 50 on Fire honorees, Notarize secured a $35 million Series C round in March, then went on to experience 400 percent growth in a 90-day period as the pandemic forced people to rely on remote, digital notarizations to complete transactions. During that period, Notarize onboarded more than 1,600 notaries. Notarize has recently signed deals with Adobe, J.D. Power and Dropbox.
Cybereason: Cybersecurity threats are on an alarming upswing, and Boston cybersecurity startup Cybereason has managed to capitalize on that, marking 2020 as a record year with consecutive quarters of revenue growth. The seven-year-old company, which was our Inno Blazer in the tech category in our 2017 50 on Fire, opened a new office in the United Arab Emirates and expanded further into Asia and Africa, now selling its software and services in more than 30 countries. In late 2019, Cybereason raised a $200 million Series E round, which Crunchbase reported was the largest cybersecurity fundraise ever landed in Greater Boston.
Mentor Collective: Mentor Collective, one of our 2018 50 on Fire, seeks to provide all college students with “a transformative mentoring experience.” Launched in 2013, the edtech startup has now matched more than 37,000 students with mentors. Mentor Collective achieved 127 percent revenue growth between 2018 and 2019 and nearly doubled its team last year.
American Inno associate editor Rowan Walrath and contributing writers Emma Campbell and Jordan Frias contributed to this article.
This article has been updated.
