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The people have spoken. After six rounds of voting and 32,321 votes cast across the entire competition, we finally have our Inno Madness champion.
But before we celebrate their victory, let’s take a moment to recognize their fallen competitors.
Voting in this year’s Inno Madness competition began in March with 64 companies representing different industries and stages, from large software companies to early-stage healthtech startups. Several large companies who have raised significant funding fell early on, including Klaviyo and Snyk. Readers seemed eager to support some underdogs in the competition, carrying some relatively unknown names like Ezly Rent and Minute Kitchen through several rounds of voting. Other companies who made it to the quarter finals included Sea Machines, Wasabi, Paperless Parts, Wabbi, ezCater and HYCU. After that round of voting, Ezly Rent and Minute Kitchen were paired up against HYCU and Wasabi, respectively. Voters lifted Minute Kitchen to a win with 51% of the votes, setting it up to compete against HYCU, which also won its matchup by 51% of the votes.
Last year, Realtime Robotics secured the Inno Madness crown with nearly 80% of the votes. This year, voting in the finals came down to the wire: After more than 10,000 votes were cast in the sixth and final round of Inno Madness, HYCU came out on top, earning 51% of the votes.
Its competitor Minute Kitchen, a startup founded by graduate students at Babson College, put up a strong fight. But ultimately, HYCU’s supporters delivered the Boston-based company a victory. CEO Simon Taylor said “there was a big rallying cry” among their team to win Inno Madness this year. The competitive spirit even extended beyond employees.
One example included the daughter of Shreesha Pai Manoor, HYCU’s head of customer success. Taylor said the freshman in high school visited HYCU’s office on a day off from school.
“She came into our office, this young lady, probably 14, 15 years old, and she said, ‘I just want you to know that me and all my friends voted for HYCU,’” Taylor said.
Taylor said customers who had heard about the competition also started voting for HYCU.
“I think all of these companies being a part of (Inno Madness is) actually a really critical part of understanding the blueprint that makes up Boston’s tech scene. And I think for us, that’s what was so important about it and why we decided to get involved,” Taylor said.
HYCU participated in Inno Madness last year but lost in the first round to Wabbi. This year, HYCU beat out ezCater, Starburst, Owl Labs and Solon Labs on its way to victory.
Taylor co-founded HYCU in 2018. The company is a “backup as a service business,” Taylor said.
“We do cloud data protection, meaning that what we do is no matter where your data sits, whether it’s on premises, in a data center or it’s in public cloud or it’s in SaaS, HYCU can actually protect, backup, recover and even migrate your data to provide disaster recovery capabilities,” Taylor said.
The chief executive said their goal is to ensure business continuity for their customers, who include the federal government and the Red Sox. Overall, Taylor said HYCU has over 3,600 customers. Earlier this year, HYCU also launched R-Cloud. The company said this low-code, data protection development platform allows SaaS companies and independent software vendors to provide, in days, backup and recovery services for their SaaS offerings.
Taylor said HYCU has around 300 employees in 10 countries, but its headquarters is in Boston’s Seaport. There are about 50 people based out of the Boston area, Taylor said, but some of those people are remote.
While HYCU has taken part in Inno Madness before, Taylor said this year the company is at a new stage in its growth, which he thinks helped propel them to victory.
“We were a different business today than we were a few years ago. After raising $140 million, after bringing on great investors, hiring top talent up and down the ranks, everybody in the business was incredibly focused on making sure that this was a real win for HYCU, and obviously the result kind of speaks for itself,” Taylor said.
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