It’s December, which for newswriters is not primarily about holiday shopping. For us, December mostly means looking back at the past year and churning out ultra-astute assessments about how things went.
So here’s my first offering: 2015 was a really good year for Boston in terms of brand-new startups getting launched. Below I’ve listed 10 of the Boston tech companies founded this year, and it's a pretty solid class. Many of them have raised funding—in some cases, a whole lot of it—and nearly all of them have founders that’ve already had major success elsewhere in the Boston tech community. Those include alums of Kayak, Actifio, Demandware and a number of others.
As always, let me know who I missed by email or in the comments.
• Cybric is developing what it calls "continuous security virtualization," which aims to dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to identify and remediate cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The startup is "automating and virtualizing the entire process offline in a shadow environment."
• Founders: CEO Ernesto DiGiambattista (former CTSO of Sentinel Benefits & Security); Chief Innovation Officer Mike Kail (former CIO & Infrastructure SVP at Yahoo); COO Andrew Gilman (former exec at Dell EqualLogic and Actifio); and Chief Design Officer Sean Walter (founder and Chief UI Architect at Actifio)
• Funding: $1.3 million seed funding led by Petrillo Capital. Read more.
Desktop Metal
• New type of 3D printer for making parts from metals such as aluminum
• Founders: Ric Fulop, formerly of North Bridge Venture Partners; MIT Materials Science head Chris Schuh; Yet-Ming Chiang, co-founder of A123 Systems
• Funding: $14 million from New Enterprise Associates, Kleiner Perkins, Founder Collective, Lux Capital and Bolt.
• Mobile tool that will instantly book you a new flight on any airline at no extra cost in the event of cancellation, four-hour delay or missed connection.
• Founders: CEO Ethan Bernstein (formerly a senior manager for corporate development at Expedia); CTO Sam Zimmerman (previously a data scientist for Boston-based PowerAdvocate)
• Funding: $3.5 million from investors including General Catalyst, Accomplice and Slow Ventures. Read more.
• Via the website: Fuzzy Compass “connects you directly to the travel influencers behind the world’s most popular travel blogs, websites, and Instagram accounts. Use their expertise and unique insight to plan a customized trip just for you.” The startup is currently offering early-access signups for the service.
• Founder: Sasha Hoffman, former head of business development for Plastiq
• Funding: Not disclosed
• App that lets fans of sports video games connect and compete in one-on-one matches for cash.
• Founder: Nathan Dionne, former CTO of Barstool Sports
• Funding: Bootstrapped. Read more.
• Robotics for moving inventory through a warehouse fulfillment center. The startup spun off from Quiet Logistics this year, though the development of the technology was started two years ago, a spokesperson said.
• Founders: Bruce Welty (CEO of Quiet Logistics)
• Funding: $6 million from undisclosed investors. Read more.
• Lola (formerly known for a time as Blade Travel) aims to connect travelers with live travel agents using a travel-booking smartphone app. The app went into beta this week and is expected to officially launch in the first quarter of 2015. Within the next year, Lola plans to hire about 100 travel agents as employees, and the company is seeking to reach about 250 employees total by the end of next year (they currently employ 31). The company had originally begun under the name Blade as a foundry for consumer startups, but shifted gears this fall.
• Founders: Paul English (co-founder and former CTO of Kayak), Bill O'Donnell (former chief architect at Kayak)
• Funding: Blade had raised $20 million in 2014 from General Catalyst and Accel Partners, which had both invested in Kayak.
• Mobile e-commerce software; provides custom-made mobile websites that let customers pay for products using their phone while in-store, among other features.
• Founders: Stephan Schambach, previously the founder of Demandware
• Funding: $38 million led by General Catalyst. Read more.
Talla
• Via Rob May’s LinkedIn: “New machine intelligence company. Launching late 2015. If you think Word2vec, data science, and sparse distributed representations are interesting, you should come work with us.”
• Founders: Rob May, previously the founder of Backupify (acquired by Datto)
• Funding: Not disclosed.
• On-demand business concierge service for startups and (eventually) larger companies; connects users with various products and services they need to do business.
• Founders: Streetwise Media founders Chase Garbarino, Kevin McCarthy and Gregory Gomer; Dailybreak founders Boris Revsin and Jared Stenquist.
• Funding: $2 million from investors including Accomplice, Boston Seed, Dharmesh Shah, Diane Hessan, Jason Robins, Mike Baker, Sarah Hodges, Fred Shilmover, Brent Grinna and Phil Beauregard. Read more.
Disclosure: Streetwise Media is the parent company of BostInno.
Photos courtesy of the companies.
