When Doug Morgan sold his startup to Lola Travel in 2015, he moved across the country, from the San Francisco Bay area to Boston, where he would go on to lead an engineering team for the new startup from Kayak co-founder Paul English.
But now, after a year and half of working for Lola, Morgan has moved on to another tech company in Boston, BostInno has exclusively learned. Starting as his new job in late April, Morgan is now director of engineering at TetraScience, an Internet of Things startup that provides a connectivity platform for scientific instruments and other equipment found in science labs. The company went through the prestigious Y Combinator startup accelerator program in 2015.
The announcement of Morgan's departure from Lola comes after English said last week that the travel startup would be pivoting from a consumer offering to a travel-booking service exclusively for business travelers. Morgan was CTO and co-founder of hopOn, a travel booking service that Lola acquired in fall 2015. Lola has raised nearly $45 million total in venture funding from GV, General Catalyst and other firms, and it has acquired one other company, Expedia-backed Room 77.
"It’s really cool to be able to say we’re going to make science better."
While Morgan was still at Lola, he said he wasn't looking for new opportunities. But then TetraScience co-founder and CTO Siping "Spin" Wang reached out to Morgan for an opportunity to lead an engineering team. Morgan said his father is a scientist and his mom a tech entrepreneur, so he liked the idea of "marrying" the two fields.
"It’s really cool to be able to say we’re going to make science better," Morgan told me. When asked about his time at Lola, he said he "could not speak more highly about [English] and everyone else there."
Founded by scientists and engineers from Harvard and MIT, TetraScience provides a hardware and software platform that lets R&D teams connect their scientific instruments to the cloud so that they can remotely monitor and control their experiments, collect scientific data, as well as perform analytics and reporting. The startup's hardware can connect to all kinds of instruments, regardless of manufacturer.
TetraScience now has 70 customers, Director of Marketing Lindsey Christensen told me, and that revenue growth has been growing at a rate of 10x over the last 12 months. The company now has 26 employees.
Of those employees, Morgan said he will be managing a team of nine. In less than a month, he said he has already recruited two more engineers to join the team, including one who was also previously in San Francisco. One of the other reasons Morgan said he joined TetraScience is because he has a passion for building engineering teams.
