The original customer was supposed to be a small business owner. Somewhere around Harvard Square, someone needed help with pricing, a register, a business problem too complicated to ignore and too modest for a consulting firm. Across the street were MBA students with spare hours. In 2013, connecting those two groups looked like a perfectly sensible class project. The name was HourlyNerd. You could practically hear the elevator pitch.
- Connects companies with independent consultants, advisors and project teams.
- Focuses on experienced operators and specialists for defined business problems.
- Charges engagement fees; its consultant guide gives a 20–35% range.
Then a more interesting customer appeared: the manager inside a large company. The corporation could afford consultants. That particular manager, with that particular budget, often could not. The same marketplace solved a different problem. Catalant’s history turns on that distinction: a company can have enormous resources and still leave the person doing the work short of expertise.
01The name was the first thing to outgrow
Pat Petitti, Rob Biederman, Peter Maglathlin and Joe Miller founded the business at Harvard Business School. Petitti had worked at Booz Allen Hamilton and Vantage Partners. Biederman came from investing. Their early proposition paired business-school talent with smaller clients; the market pulled them toward experienced specialists and enterprise work.
In July 2016, HourlyNerd became Catalant. GE and Pfizer were already named customers. The rebranding announcement described software that matched project requests to experts and preserved project information so companies could share knowledge. An awkward name had become an awkward fit for the buying committee. Changing it acknowledged how far the original customer hypothesis had moved.
Selling the new habit was expensive. Forbes reported in 2017 that about 70 of Catalant’s 150 employees worked in sales. A marketplace still had to persuade companies to buy this way. Its $41 million financing that year was intended for marketing and software research and development. Adoption required people.
02A firm assembled around the problem
Today, Catalant sits between the broad freelance marketplace and the established management consultancy. Its customers include enterprises, private equity investors, portfolio companies and consulting firms that need additional expertise. Work spans operations, strategy, finance, transactions, organizational change and digital implementation. The unit of purchase can be a specialist, an advisor or a team.
Geography adds another matching problem. In 2024, Catalant announced alliances with eight other marketplaces, including Madrid’s Connecting Visions, Vienna’s Klaiton and Paris-based WEEM. The practical attraction was local expertise for international clients. For a global company, finding someone who understands a market can matter as much as finding someone who understands a function. A large database alone does not make those two needs coincide.
That puts it alongside alternatives ranging from independent boutiques and talent platforms to McKinsey, Bain and BCG. Catalant’s pitch emphasizes direct access to people who have already handled the relevant business problem, including former corporate operators and consulting alumni. A buyer can seek someone familiar with a specific function or industry, rather than accept whatever team a firm has available.
Its October 2024 overhaul made that positioning more concrete. Catalant Teams supported individual and group engagements; Advisory offered experienced sounding boards and help defining work; Benches assembled curated pools of available experts. Sales became organized around client industries. An expert-focused organization helped independent consultants develop their practices. The matchmaking business was adding the relationships and support that make repeat work possible.
03What a shipping bill can teach you
Consider the consumer-products company in one Catalant case study. Spreadsheets and an all-forwarder shipping model were struggling with freight volatility. Catalant connected the buyer with Marblehead Consulting Group, led by Dirk Stammnitz. The specialists analyzed shipping lanes, proposed buying some capacity directly from carriers, and introduced TenderEasy procurement software.
The tender took 14 weeks. Catalant reports $40.8 million in savings, approximately 37%. The useful detail is the buyer’s initial hesitation about changing its sourcing model. Lane-level analysis gave it a reason to reconsider. The lesson to copy: test a purchasing assumption against actual transactions, then give the team a process for acting on the result. Treat the savings as a reported customer outcome, not an expected return.
04The fee has a denominator
Catalant earns money from consulting engagements. Its public consultant guide says most opportunities use fixed fees and defined deliverables. It also gives a client-specific Catalant fee range of 20–35%, agreed contractually. Travel and other expenses are estimated separately. A match begins a paid service relationship.
Its March 2025 Champions agreement makes the arithmetic explicit. In an illustrative $1 million engagement with a 35% Catalant fee, $350,000 goes to Catalant and $650,000 represents expert fees, excluding expenses and third-party charges. That is a share of the total bill. Buyers comparing proposals need to know whether a percentage describes the whole invoice or a markup on consultant pay.
Investors have financed the effort to make these transactions repeatable. Goldfinch Partners led a $35 million Series E announced in January 2020. A further $35 million investment led by Morningside Group followed in March 2021. Those financing announcements do not measure the value a client receives.
A fee is a slice of the whole.
05The next bottleneck is implementation
In September 2026, Catalant launched Forward Deployed Experts, pairing business operators with AI engineers. The service starts with business goals and workflows, then follows through implementation and adoption. It extends the company’s central argument: knowing how a department actually works matters when you are trying to change it.
“Technology isn’t the hard part.”
Pat Petitti · FDX launch · September 2026
“Technology isn’t the hard part,” Petitti said in the launch announcement. Catalant backed its argument with an analysis of more than 6,600 client conversations. Those conversations concern its own enterprise and private equity customers, a useful window into demand rather than a census of every AI project. The distinction matters when reading a vendor’s diagnosis of its market.
The model asks something of the buyer, too. A specialist needs access to data, an internal sponsor and authority to change a process. Hiring expertise cannot supply those automatically. A project with no agreed outcome, no owner or no room to alter daily work is a poor candidate for this approach. Before buying, write down the decision, the deliverable and who must act on it.
That is the interesting continuity between HourlyNerd and Catalant. The business began by making outside help accessible. It has spent the years since learning what must surround that help: a clear assignment, relevant experience, workable economics and someone inside the company willing to use the answer.